Whether it is better for a city to provide internet access is debatable. Essentially having it paid through taxes makes it political. For example, what about content? I wouldn't want my TV choices to be influenced by local fanatics or political winds. That said it was pretty low of SBC to try to block it

I've been both an SBC stockholder and and SBC customer. Thank goodness I sold that terrible stock long ago when it was worth something. If they are making so much money, why is the company doing so poorly and the stock in the tank?

The answer is competition. SBC has to compete versus AOL and a myriad of regional Cable companies like Comcast and Sinclair and Cox. Its far from a monopoly in the non rural areas. I am blessed with many choices here in Chicagoland. Yes it costs too much. The answer is competition. Blame your local government for allowing it to be so if it doesn't exist. Basically they just wire us up, how complicated can that be?

The cable companies are really the ones gouging. My bill went way down about $80 a month to $150 a month when I switched from Comcast to SBC for phone/dish/dsl. I was mad at Comcast because even tho their internet was 'faster', very many applications did not work. Comcast's technical people were just awful. It was always the software. Also Comcast has no access to precious liberal channels like LINKTV and Free Speech TV. They are nasty right wingers and basically shut out liberal programming. Cox was the same when I lived in Northern California. Sinclair is notorious which fanatical owners who are accountable to noone. Also remember Bill Daley, a Democrat, ran SBC and they also bargained in good faith with their unions. But mostly I like them because their product is cheaper and better. There is DSL and Broadband and AOL and who cares? I sure don't. All I want is it to work, which is mostly does, and be cheap and give me liberal political access.

The problem is the rural areas. It costs alot to put wires out there. This is not a new problem. The same thing happened in the 1930's. They enacted the Rural Electrification Act which gave government loans to businesses to go out there and hook us all up. Its a simple thing. Here is the 1936 law, substitute Internet in the appropriate places and get it done! Link to act is here:

http://www.usda.gov/rus/regs/info/100-1/title_i.htm

Let's call it The Rural Internet Access Act of 2006

Americans do things with companies and with competition. This money with provide multiple providers for all of rural America and provide jobs and growth for our enemic telecom industry. Kill off the evil Sinclair dinosaurs with some goood old fashion competition.

Your article on broadband Internet mistakenly describes cable companies as monopolies in order to characterize them as "bad guys" benefitting from some kind of government protection. In fact, cable companies do not operate with exclusive rights in municipalities, and are not guranteed rate protection like the telcos were in the past. In the Chicago area alone three cable companies operate, bringing competition to the neighborhoods they serve. This is because of the non-exclusive franchises municipalities grant. Don't lump the cable companies in with the likes of Verizon and SBC, and don't fault them for wanting to make a profit in a highly competitve, broadband market.

We call it deregulation, but in effect 97% of all the customers still buy from the incumbents. Contrast this with the other countries mentioned who had a dominant monopoly but now enjoy a vibrant competitive market for local telecommunications including broadband access and you'd find meaningful deregulation. It�s a classic example of Schumpeter�s concept of �Creative Destruction�.

To our great peril we have an government in place that has never met a monopoly it didn�t like. Broadcast or Print Communications, Energy, Defense, Environment, Technology, Telecommunications, Transportation, Agribusiness, Health Care or Banking there isn�t a major policy arena in which corruption hasn�t retarded progress.

I�ve been building Internet infrastructure since there was an AUP on the Internet, corruption in Congress and the FCC, as well as the lack of effective enforcement of Securities and Anti-Trust regulation has taken America from the Country that invented the Internet not only to number 16 in the world in broadband penetration, but to a place severely handicapped by constraints on new software applications, interoperability and a wide variety of infrastructure modernity.

I'm living in Prague, Czech Republic and the Prague 5 municipality offer free bandwidth to the area. All that is required is that a landlord provide a link to the WiFi antennae posted around the neighbourhood; a dish and some wires.

It amazes me that a country with such a comparitively low level of income as well as a retarded development (due to 40 years of communism) can offer services to its citizenry far beyond the scope of what the US can.

Mike McGuffie

Prague, CZ

(formerly of Vancouver Island, Canada)

It's easy enough to see that we're not a 'life sciences' country. We don't have the will or the inclination to promote life science education and research over the objections of 18th Century White Taliban moralizers. And it's almost as easy to see that we don't really worry, as a country, about science generally unless it's in a narrow spectrum of defense related engineering and physics. But it strikes me that as we unwind the clock, whether it's for socially reactionary reasons or for reasons of pure economic Darwinism, we're confronted with the obvious fact that we're anti-Progress. We are opposed to advancement and progress on its face. We don't seem to see an advantage let alone a need for the innovation and progress that the rest of the world is eager to develop. It's just not for us. We're not a science place, we're not a modern country. We have some modern tools, conveniences and weapons for sure but we are slowly becoming a country that feeds off the sucesses of the past. They left us the instruction manual and we'll keep using the shiny things until they break. Then one day we'll wake up and we'll say we used to have fire but the inventor died.

All over the world telcom is in better shape than it is here. In places like Korea for example you can get faster broadband to your cell phone than you can get at any price to your house here in the US. Why is that? Well for a number of reasons. For years during the Michael Powell era at the FCC we were told the mantra of Adam Smith's invisible bitch hand of commerce. We were told by the FCC commissioner quote I have no idea what the public interest is, unquote. And now with Commissioner Cotton Mather Khomeni, our new FCC commissioner, apparently the jobs, the only two jobs of the FCC are to ensure that regional monopolies suck cash from consumers and those same consumers are never exposed to dirty words and the random image of human naughty bits. So in the end perhaps we're destined to become a new cargo cult, beating on our long broken cable modems remembering a day long ago before the rest of the world operated hotdog stands on the moon.