There are always two sides to every story

Americans don't know it yet but even the third world has better internet speeds than they do.

And it's dirt cheap

Before the war in Ukraine I had stable 1 Gbit/s for 5$/month with two dedicated IPs

Here in Ireland you get 100 Kbits/s sometimes because they can't pull you a fiber connection and 4G towers are overloaded to hell, and it costs 20-40€/month
And without data caps.

It's funny how out of touch with reality Americans are.

Here in Brazil I'm paying around 20 USD for fiber optic 1000mbps down and 500mbps up without data caps. Brazilian law also only considers piracy a crime if there's profit (i.e. trying to sell a movie I've downloaded), so there's no need to hide anything.

Editing for more information:

My home internet speeds almost never drop below 90%, there's also a law that requires ISPs to deliver at least 80% of what was paid for. You can easily port forward, there are no blocks or anything. We also have dynamic IPs, but you can easily get around that by using a DDNS.

My mobile plan is around $15, I get 45GB monthly with 5G at no extra cost (5G gets around 300-600mbps down depending on the time of the day), unlimited calling to any number in the country, unlimited SMS (nobody uses SMS though), and for roaming I get 1GB daily internet and 1 hour daily calling with no extra cost.

All of this is cheap and very accessible to everyone.

Out of touch also in feeling like it’s funny to post this shit

Even if it was true, would still be a cringe meme.

I hope that OP is just young and naive and not an old who thinks the world is divided like that
- point taken however Brazil in not most 3rd world countries there is also most of Africa ( with south Africa being an exception )
dynamic ips can be sometimes a good thing like when downloading from file hoster that have a timer limit

reboot router, refresh page, profit.
I mean, I’m not going to defend our internet in the US which can be absolutely shit, but salaries are quite a bit different in Brazil. I also don’t recall internet options being all that glamorous an hour outside of Porto Alegre.
- While the salaries and economic power in Brazil are a lot lower than the US, our internet and phone plans are a lot cheaper, accessible and provide a better service than most of the US, that still stuck in data caps, feature blocking and low speeds.

Lol, some third world countries have faster internet than the average New York apartment.

I've got gigabit here in colombia. Costs me ~$30 a month and fuck that vpn shit since no one cares if you torrent.

American internet is garbage, as others have already pointed out.
The term "third world country" is outdated, inaccurate, and usually offensive. It often comes off as racist, even if that's not intentional. Try to avoid using it unless you're sure it's appropriate (it almost never is).

What that designation OFFICIALLY meant is that the country remained neutral during the Cold War. That's all! The "First World" countries were NATO allies and the "Second World" countries were the other side led by the Soviet Union. The implication is that the countries that didn't pick a side in the Cold War were underdeveloped (which is a flawed assumption, but it was partially correct AT THE TIME).

More recently, the term has become synonymous with "poor" countries, usually those filled with non-white people. Which is dumb, because plenty of the first- and second-world countries WERE and ARE very poor. And some countries that WERE under-developed during the Cold War have since become more developed. India is the most obvious example, it's surpassing China in a lot of population+economic metrics now.

tl;dr "third world country" is a designation that's not only offensive; it's outdated, inaccurate, and dumb.

Case in point: Sweden and Finland were Third World countries.

Me literally seing this through fiber in a third world country

Man, I literally have one of the cheapest internet in the world + don't need vpn, third world country W

what about upload ?
- I’m paying 25€ for 600/300
- we don't need to care about upload since it's generally direct download and not torrent here.
  Edit : the up/down ration seems to be 2.4 : 1.4

Meanwhile in Romania:

✅ No VPN needed ✅ Some of the fastest internet speeds in the world ✅ $10/month for FTTH 1Gbps ❌ No money to build a PC that can play the games you downloaded

Can’t have it all though.

Lmao. The US basically ~~had~~ has the worst internet, speeds and prices wise. WE HAVE CAPS!!!!

Born and bred African here (third-world "shithole"): 400/200 ($60pm).

Uncapped obviously. This isn't 2005.

Probably wouldn't cost much more for 1000/200 but I wouldn't get to that with a wireless mesh setup in my house anyway.

This meme is false.

I don’t live in 3rd world country, I get great internet speeds for cheap (1000d/100u for like 25$), and I don’t need a VPN.

The US just sucks lol

In Vietnam ISPs are pushing gigabit plans, we paid around 10.5$/month (⬇️1Gbps/⬆️150Mbps) or 14.5$/month for 1Gbps up and down. The speed is not guaranteed though, but reached gigabit most of the time, minimum is 300Mbps.

Of course no data cap and relaxed piracy policies, no vpn needed.

I seed around 5Tb per month, I pay 20€ for 1Gbps up / 1Gbps down connection.

I'm happy i live in a third world country

Just curious... Why would VPN make easier to download/seed? I live in one of the shitty countries where most people who download pirated stuff don't even understand its not legal lol. VPN cant speed up your connection, but I got it anyway for safety (aka nerd behavior 😂). Speed is the same, only wallet is lighter

That’s not what the pic is implying. The pic is implying that yes, while third world countries don’t need vpn as their isps don’t care what they download, the downside of being in a third world country is the god awful internet speeds. It’s not saying a vpn would improve the experience.
The meme is a good case of correlation doesn't imply causation. In countries where vpns are a must they might have better overall download/seed because of generally better internet. (Which also isn't always the case, plenty of places in the USA have just as shitty down/up
most of us pirates get our media by using torrents, in Europe and north America piracy is illegal ( downloading copyrighted material without permission is a better term ) and it is punished by law some countries gives huge fines and other can even jail you for it ( like USA ) but it is not the government who is in the lookout for these people but "copyright trolls" an independent companies pied by the copyright owner to extract settlement money from people ( essentially they go to people saying :"you have infringed our copyright so if you don't want us to sue you, you can give us i don't know .....50K $ to forgive you )

how they catch these people in the first place is by going to torrent trackers and logging IP address then figure out whose those IP address belong to,in some case they would go to the IP owners directly but mostly they go to the ISP and send them a letter saying "this IP address did a no no downloading our song that we want to go triple diamond💎💎💎" witch the ISP to avoid trouble forward it to you, and depending on the ISP they may do nothing afterward or ban your account after multiple infringements which if they are the only ISP in town sucks.

what VPNs do is that they mask your real IP address so they can't know who you are to sue you and if the VPN have a no logs policy they wouldn't know your real address even if they try to sue the VPN for it.

note that this does not apply to DLL (direct downloads from websites) as it does not count as evidence that you visited the website even if it hosts copyrighted material in most countries

i tried to explain this as simple as i could , also note that i omitted some details for the sake of simplicity
- Incorrect. The only country in North America that has defined piracy as downloading is the USA. Thanks for lumping the rest of us in with them again.
if you are sure that no one got in trouble for it before you probably don't need it

in poland i pay some 12€ monthly for 600mbps down/150mbps up, and that runs on coax. Even some podunk villages have fibre and it's all from EU money

also as long as you don't torrent polish movies nobody gives a fuck so not even vpn is needed

YDKSA3WC

American?

I don’t live in 3rd world country, I get great internet speeds for cheap (1000u/100d for like 25$), and I don’t need a VPN.

The US just sucks lol

Canada experience is basically this as well. Our ISPs are trash but mine is pretty based about not sharing information with copyright holders

Ha! Speak for yourself!

Objection! Romania

I use private trackers and haven’t had issues not using a VPN in the US

Italy: the best of 2 worlds (except Im stuck with early 2000s adsl in 2023)

Italy: the best of 2 worlds (except Im stuck with early 2000s adsl in 2023)

haha me too

As a Greek... I relate... :")

I live in Canada. I torrented without a VPN for years, only got one scare tactic email. I also had up to* 25 Mb/s with a data cap for $100/month. Guess Canada is a third world country.

You can download whatever you want without a VPN, seeding is another subject, all the ISPs here offers CGNATED only networks, the only way to bypass this is effectively with a VPN, a commercial one that offers opening the ports you want or using a personal one hosted in a VPS.

I have an IPv6, but last time I have checked that is virtually useless for seeding purposes.