forced backwards compatibility

I certainly agree with most of the badness of the things that you cite except for the above. I think you have the direction wrong when you think of which way the force was for backward compatibility. It was not from MS to customers. It was the other way around.

MS had no choice but to support backward compatibility. Their desire to survive forced them into this position. Had they chosen to abandon it, their customers would have left them. It was customer demand for compatibility that kept it around.

Right, ok. AT&T wants to increase the price of their bandwidth. At which point, the blog, or the blog reader, or both will switch to someone who isn't increasing their price.

Is there not sufficient competition within ISP's to make that feasible?

For the record, most structural engineers who work on very tall buildings (yes, I'm one) tend to take the view that its habitable space that matters - but having said that some large spires are accessible with observation decks and whatever so these would probably count too. There's a fair bit of difference in the amount of engineering effort required for these than for some carbon fibre mast stuck on top for bragging rights.