Our New Era

Whoa, that's quite a generalization...

2002: the internet was open to everyone; 2005: the internet was absolutely open to everyone.

No offense, but Moscow and St. Petersburg aren't "everyone." In 2002, the best you could get was a sloooow modem. In 2005, some lucky people had a "dedicated line," as it was called back then. But even that came with a thousand limitations – the only unlimited plan was extremely expensive. In 2007, a cheap, but again sloooow, unlimited plan appeared. And only in early 2008 did a reasonably fast (though not entirely stable) unlimited plan become available. And that's in Yekaterinburg, one of the largest cities in Russia. Imagine what it was like (and some say still is) in smaller cities?