Somewhere along the way, I lost the logic in the universal broadband argument. For years, I would have said, "Sure, for our national economic interests, broadband should be ubiquitous, like the postal service, or Starbucks." But after years of private and public broadband deployment and the telco/cable wars, the case for spending tens of billions in federal taxpayer money to finish the job amid roaring deficits began to slip away from me. Leave aside for a moment the notion that federal economic stimulus efforts aimed at rural broadband could undo local and regional economic stimulus efforts, as cities that proactively built out broadband to lure jobs might lose them to the wide open spaces.
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