You can use whatsapp over IRC->Bitlbee and reading newspapers at least for text mode. Privilege? more like the reverse. There are phone data plans for $10 that upon finishing your monthly data, you got throttled like that until the next month.

And in my country people did crazy stuff in order to ilegally watch soccer matches in cable TV's, such as writting magnetic deco cards with an electronic PICF84 based tool.

That compared to using Lagrange and gemini://gemi.dev to read the local newspapers and bookmark them in order to avoid typing down the https:// URL over and over, it's lke going for a Ph.D instead of joining a local library.

People isn't that dump, it's just lazy. And, sadly, uninformed.

In the infamous blackout in Spain, I was the only one in the bus that could fetch the news reliabily over Gemini due to the low bandwitdh. The rest were waiting over and over.

And after that everyone got a pocket radio tuner just because. Something I was just doing over decades too because FM and AM radio will actually work anywhere.

But the web doesn't offer a nice degradation. In the blackout, they just kept sending the full raw data, literal thousands of cookie trackers, JS scripts and the mandatory ads. You at least have https://text.npr.org and https://lite.cnn.com. My country? They just pushed the web SPA's and OFC they set no OPUS stream (something every smartphone understands from at least 2012) with a smaller bitrate.