That assumes the same amount of information is being passed around. The ease of the modern internet has led to more work being produced for servers to process. No video site 10 years ago had HD enabled by default, for instance.
I couldn't find a source that says when YouTube started showing videos in 720p by default, but I did find this circumstantial evidence that shows it was after October 2012, so at most 9 years 8 months ago: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/68318/view-youtube...
