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The internet is changing rapidly, but the death of dial-up has been slow. According to The New York Times, in 2023 dial-up still served an estimated 163,000 households in the United States, or just over one percent of the nation’s household internet subscriptions. That one percent will have to find an alternative come September, when AOL will officially shut down the iconic but already archaic method of getting on the web.
“AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet,” the company wrote in a statement posted to its website. “This service will no longer be available in AOL plans. As a result, on September 30, 2025 this service and the associated software, the AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser, which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued.”
Given its very small customer base, the phasing out of dial-up was inevitable, though there are still places in the United States (and certainly the world) without reliable access to the internet. Satellite television is also on the decline; earlier this year DirecTV began “experimenting” with only offering streaming options in certain areas. In rural areas without internet access streaming would also be impossible, and there is not yet infrastructure in place for widespread broadband access. If services like these die before that infrastructure exists, there may be parts of the country completely cut off from access to information. For those of us who do have internet access, information is becoming completely siloed as Google devalues its own search engine in favor of generative artificial intelligence, a move that could in turn collapse the online media industry as we know it. It appears the Digital Age was built on a troublingly unsound foundation. At this rate, who knows what the next age is going to look like.
