[billiam]

Exactly. I think that the woeful state of US broadband and wireless infrastructure today is the strongest proof of the failure of a poorly regulated private sector that effectively has captured telecom governance. That sunny world of virtual worlds and holographic telepresence will happen in Singapore a lot sooner than in the US if government allows the Internet to look like Cable TV.

I consider Andreesson to have zero credibility in this matter, for reasons stated above and more. Why not allow rich and powerful corporations to control access to US consumers? Our smartest consumer startups, denied US consumers, will start to build Twitter and Pinterest and other services for consumers outside of AT&T and Verizon's control, and we will be more and more irrelevant as a market and a technology innovator.

[rayiner]

It's weird to me to blame the "state of U.S. broadband" on the telecom providers, and in the same breadth compare it to Singapore, a city-state where all 5 million people live in a single urban area of 270 square miles (i.e. a bit smaller than New York City with a population density a bit higher than San Francisco).

The state of broadband and wireless in the U.S. is proof only of the fact that it's much more expensive to build infrastructure to a huge, sparely-populated country with large suburban, exurban, and rural populations. Half of South Korea lives in the metro area of the largest city. About 30% of people in England live in the metro area of London. About 25% of people in Finland live in the metro area of Helsinki. Only 4% of the people in the USA live in the metro area of New York City. Beyond that, more than half the population of metro London lives in the city proper. For a typical U.S. city like Boston or DC or Atlanta, its more like 15%.