Well, if this is true, it explains a lot as to why the U.S. is dragging far behind Japan and Korea (and probably soon Malaysia) in deploying broadband Internet:

Thumbnail  — In extensive detail, (over 460 footnotes, 330 pages) I prove, with the Bell’s own data, that  the Bell companies systematically lied about their previous fiber deployments  in order to get  changes to state laws to give them more money to build these networks. — What was  promised was fiber to the home, 45mbps, bi- directional, and capable of 500 channels, deployed in rural, urban and suburban areas equally.

By 2006, 86 million households should have been rewired.  More to the  point, these networks were funded by customers — about $2000 per household.

— $200 Billion Broadband Scandal by Bruce Kushnick

Meanwhile, Japan and Korea, seeing what was proposed in the states, went ahead and did it in their countries.

It would seem that Eisenhower, while he understood in general the rising influence of technology:

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

— Farewall Address to the Nation, by Dwight D. Eisenhower

He probably didn’t completly grasp what can happen when corporations take over the results of research and discovery and the degree of effect that could have on public policy. If Kushnick is right, the effect is large and it has put the U.S. at risk of becoming an economic backwater, and the rest of the world at risk of what a telecom-government controled Internet in the U.S. may do.

-jsq