the references are metaphorical. App developers like Facebook have Lite versions of their Messenger. No actualy physical sectoring or allocation needs to take place. What it's emphazing is that App developers have a liteweight mode. Google got rid of their HTML page version when checking GMail on the web in 2024. Their app still works relatively fast, but on a 128KBps connection, loading a single page on the Javascript only desktop browser version is really, really slow. Like 5-10 minutes slow. I wrote more in another response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48453653

The Symbian phones from Nokia and Sony were ultra-efficient. Not everyone remembers that era, but they were real time operating systems that ensured tasks got completed in a certain time, including user-prompted inputs. It's not a technical limitation of a company or service, but a lot of their revenue might depend on a minimum number of ads or cookies and web analytic trackers being visible on a page. Often in the numbers of 30 or 100+. With all those elements removed from a site, the service might not bring in much revenue. So it's not really an issue of technical capability, but a business model.

Personal blogs don't typically have this issue, as they can be hosted on a small home server, or a remote server, and aren't concerned as much with ads. I can't suggest how the internet should be run, and the article does acknowledge the benefits of a decentralized web. But predictability of content delivery ETA from internet speeds is not an impossible thing to optimize towards, even if uptime isn't above 99%. What is somewhat novel in this proposal is standardizing a subset of typical website activities, like checking news, weather and mail, and getting a more predictable completion time for certain tasks, but factoring in known latencies from wireless providers (as pings will not be as low as a wired connection), and lowering the average latency for the round trip.

On a much larger scale of interactions- but again the web is so wide and varied, that most of those things cannot be standardized, nor should. But kind of like measuring the commute time of an expressway in a city, or subway trips to a grocery. Things that people need and won't optimize more with an Uber. Hence measuring static over HTML is an easy test, and more sophisticated web services can and do have those kinds of benchmarks. But integrating the device, ISP, and server in a way where certain activities can get slightly preferential treatment like ordering and picking up a prescription at a pharmacy, setting appointments with a doctor, would not get deprioritized bandwidth compared to someone streaming something in 4k, and maybe temporarily limiting that other user's bandwidth to 1440p for maybe a few minutes.

So I do think a tiny bit of QoS or speed throttling is needed only in exceptional cases, but for the most part, the typical user wouldn't notice or necessarily need that level of speed adjustment. Most of the optimization would take place at the software, website, and OS level.

I would make that more clear. Maybe use "web" instead of internet. And drop all the references to physical infra.