There are a few towns that became their own internet providers b/c the big guys wouldn't bring them either any or adequate service and they realized they could do it themselves more cheaply. They had to fight anti-socialism propaganda and of course lobbying and disinformation campaigns from the big providers, despite the fact that they had no intention of ever going there.

there is one issue that I've found - my work blocks lemmy.zip, so I'm using the piefed account I made to test it.

My guess is that it ends in ".zip" and is getting blocked, b/c the rest of lemmy they aren't bothering with.