American government spending $7.2 billion on broadband stimulus | Techgeist

As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program and the Broadband Initiatives Program will be together paying a total of $7.2 billion to fund private efforts for delivering broadband to “unserved” or “underserved” areas. Unserved refers to areas where at least nine out of ten households don’t have what the government is calling the minimum requirements for broadband, and underserved refers to places where half of households do not have service of at least 3 Mbps down, or places where less than two-fifths of households do not subscribe to broadband.

We at TG are happy to see that to be eligible to receive funds, you must promise to abide by the FCC’s Internet Policy Statement, which means consumers are free to use whatever device they want to get online, and that providers can’t throttle bandwidth (so none of those application-crippling shenanigans allowed). Providers will have to deal with illegal online content (which is presumably the new PC term for child porn), but the other parts of the IPS suggest that violating net neutrality is not an acceptable way of doing this...