The late senator likened the Internet to a series of tubes that occasionally gets clogged. He was summarily flamed on the Internet... The good senator was valiantly trying to encapsulate his perception in simple terms, which flies in the face of coders, hackers, trolls and all of those who don’t wish to be eviscerated by this typically anonymous hoard.

There are 1,024 counties or “county equivalents” lacking broadband, according to the FCC’s Sixth Broadband Deployment Report. They comprise 24 million people in 8.9 million households that are generally poorer and more rural than the national average. The same areas very likely were outliers as the nation adopted electricity. Lights are on in Custer County, Nebraska tonight because of the Rural Electrification Act.

The broadcast television industry was shouted down this week. By the First Web Surfer himself. The presidential memo cheat sheet, issued by the National Economic Counsel, contains a bit of edifying verbiage within a paragraph calling for an inventory of current spectrum users: ...this inventory is not necessary to enable the repurposing of large swaths of spectrum.”

 It would be the height of cynicism to assert the Genachowski FCC has become a propaganda machine for the wireless industry. Only the most jaded conspiracy theorist could imagine that a Web entrepreneur temporarily appointed as a government regulator would have a self-serving agenda.