New tax for broadband customers?

I'm not sure how I feel about this, but it is clear that affordable broadband will not come to rural america without government intervention. This is clear now that providers are rolling out high-speed fiber optics to areas already served by decent and affordable level of broadband.

I laughed out loud at the comment quoted below:

"But Randolph May, a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a market-oriented think tank, said policy-makers should be cautious before making any changes. Broadband access, he said, is getting cheaper and more widely available.

'It's not clear that any subsidies are needed,' May said. 'But if policy-makers want to provide some subsidies, they should be, in my view, carefully targeted to low-income people that really need them."

The speaker just doen't get it. Free enterprise is not working to bring affordable broadband to vast numbers of people in rural areas. This is not only a low income issue, though that is part of it. It is an affordable access problem. Arguably, if I can afford $25 a month for broadband when dial-up is only $10 per month, then I'm not really poor -- $15 a month is a lot of food when those are your choices.

Is access affordable at $25 or $50 a month? Well much more so than $100 to $150 a month (which would be my real cost for satellite service or a 192 kbps dsl line). But am I "low-income"? Not by any true meaning of that word. I just can't with any reason justify spending $150 a month for marginal broadband. That's more than I spend for satellite radio, satellite tv, phone service including wireless and dial-up connectivity put together.

Maybe it is time to give free enterprise a governmental kick in the tushie before the digital divide grows yet deeper and broader.