Federal government trying to make broadband available to everyone

As promised, here's my article that ran yesterday on the federal government's push to make broadband available to everyone in the U.S. Some points that I didn't have room to expand on in the story:

1) As much as we might all be in favor of ubiquitous broadband, remember that the government is going to have to subsidize these initiatives. If an area doesn't have broadband access nowadays, it's usually because it's not profitable for an ISP to build the infrastructure. So the only way to get the ISPs to lay the cable is to offer them federal subsidies. And that's taxpayer money. And the faster the broadband speed the ISPs are mandated to offer (Google wants a minimum of 10 megabits per second, but AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, for example, are in favor of much more modest minimum speeds), the bigger the subsidies. How much of your tax money are you willing to give away to make sure that every shack in Idaho can stream HD video?...