Country living is dial-up internet living, in America!

Imagine Father Coughlin, the hateful radio demagogue of the 1930s, spewing vitriol on YouTube. That's why poor people can't be trusted with the Internet, says Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur.

Verizon, AT&T and Time Warner Cable executives told Congress yesterday they would not track user behavior online unless given explicit permission, but that they would prefer to police themselves, instead of having to deal with government oversight. Because that would be Orwellian. [Wired]

Yes, even the transient houseboats wandering the canals of the Netherlands have harder, better, faster and stronger Internet connections than you do — up to one gigabit per second over fiber optic cable. The same 120 yards of cabled glass being deployed in Amsterdam is also being deployed more slowly in New Amsterdeam, aka New York City. If only San Francisco could take such advantage of sitting atop a worldwide, fiber-optic Internet hub. [DSL Reports] (Photo by Rolf Kleef)

Comcast's announcement of a bandwidth cap for home users beginning in October has raised a recurring fear: Is the Internet being overloaded? It's not a new worry. Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe forecasted a meltdown in 1995. But our growing adoption of BitTorrent downloads and YouTube-like streaming clips must be straining the pipes, right?No. Metcalfe literally ate his words two years after his prediction. In the decade since, Internet infrastructure upgrades continue to outpace growth. So even though worldwide traffic grew by half last year, peak utilization is now less than 50 percent of available capacity. Don't believe out-of-date claims about "last mile" bottlenecks, either. Home broadband users have been built out to more traffic than they're using. Comcast's caps are about per-customer profitability, not system overload. If anything, you should feel encouraged to use the Net even more. Just make sure your ISP is willing to let you have at it. (Photo by zinkwazi)

USA Today, the smart paper that plays dumb, has a remarkably clear summary of FCC chairman Kevin Martin's plan for free broadband access — and its opposition by T-Mobile, the company that bought the wireless spectrum next door to the frequencies Martin wants to use. Here, let me make it even snappier:

Broadband growth has fallen by half in a year. Cable and telephone providers of high-speed Internet signed up 887,000 net new customers last quarter — half of the number of signups in the same period last year. Because of market saturation, companies are focusing more on selling faster, more expensive services. Nationwide, cable companies have 35.3 million broadband customers while phone companies have 29.7 million. AT&T is still the nation's largest Internet service provider with 14.7 million customers, followed by Comcast with 14.4 million customers. It's good news for AOL and EarthLink, which are profiting from a core of dial-up subscribers reluctant to embrace DSL or cable Internet. [AP]

When Comcast was caught blocking file sharing on its network, the Federal Communications Commission seemed to strike a blow in favor of peer-to-peer startups everywhere by fining the cable company. Observers assumed that the FCC decision would open the field for file sharing to turn into a legitimate business. But for BitTorrent Inc., a San Francisco startup seeking to commercialize the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol, the move against Comcast led to layoffs instead. The ruling may ultimately prove fatal to the company.

Joining Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint in press-releasing their concerns about child porn online, AOL and and AT&T announced today that they, too, will block their Internet service customers' access to Usenet newsgroups and websites suspected of hosting such illegal content. New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo engineered this arrangement, and California attorney general Jerry Brown and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (pictured here saving the children) are hot for a similar deal in-state.

If the latest study from Pew is any indication, most Americans have resigned themselves to what passes for broadband in the United States. 72 percent of cable and 62 percent of DSL subscribers are happy with their connection speeds, with only 24 percent demanding more bandwidth. Also, the digital divide is getting wider, with fewer lower-income households paying for cable or DSL plans. [GigaOm] (Photo by secretlondon123)

"If we have 10 percent better connectivity in the U.S., we get 10 percent more revenue in the U.S.," Google cofounder Larry Page told the FCC. He argued in short, that what's good for Google is good for America, speaking in favor of opening unlicensed spectrum known as "white spaces" between television broadcast frequencies. The National Association of Broadcasters and major sports leagues are opposed to the measure, with the NAB citing the FCC's failed tests of equipment made by Microsoft in 2007.

Google has invested $500 million in Clearwire, a wireless-broadband venture also backed by Sprint, Comcast, and Craig McCaw, among others. But the search engine won't contribute capacity on its private fiber-optic network to help Clearwire transmit data, a spokesman says. Google currently uses its network to interconnect its datacenters and get cheaper rates from telecommunications companies it deals with. [Unstrung]

Internet service provider Comcast is considering instituting a 250-gigabyte monthly cap on downloads, according an anonymous source cited by BroadbandReports.com. Users would be allowed one month over the cap in a year. Any month after that, and the customer would be charged $15 for each 10GB in excess. No cap is expected for uploads. Cranky RSS guru Dave Winer, who admits to downloading an astronomical 450GB a month, would end up with a regular $300 surcharge on his Comcast bill.

Ignoring customers still using modems is officially all the rage. Usability and accessibility guru Jakob Nielsen to shake fist at you all. [WebSiteOptimization, via Slashdot]

Cisco is introducing a new $75,000 piece of networking equipment, the Nexus 7000. It will, in theory, consume less power while shuttling YouTube clips and videogame downloads to your PC. Great, one more thing to feel guilty about: How your bandwidth consumption contributes to global warming. Before we know it, every Prius owner in Berkeley is going to be buying one of these things for their home datacenters.

Who needs the iPhone? Verizon Wireless added 1.9 million customers last quarter, more than analysts had predicted. In its financials, Verizon met expectations, making $1.1 billion on $23.8 billion in sales. The company also reported broadband subscribers were up 18 percent year over year, in part because of the rollout of its Fios fiber-optic service. Verizon now has more than 1 million Fios subscribers, though higher than predicted capital expenditures — including on the Fios rollout — hurt earnings. [Wall Street Journal]

Tru2way, the newly rechristened OpenCable standard that allows cable providers to do all sorts of crazy things with your TV set, was announced during CES. But now that the nerd sweat has dried, branding agency Siegal & Gale decided it was prime time to proclaim its genius to the world — how it managed to convey "true, two-way interactivity" in an "imprimatur" by coming up with "Tru2way" as a name. Of course, it didn't take into consideration the whole other side of the big, bad cable mess. Namely, nothing about cable is two-way. Let's see, AT&T is attempting to filter every piece of Internet traffic for illegal content. Comcast has been caught throttling file-sharing apps on its network. Now Time Warner wants you to pay extra for the bandwidth it promised you in the first place. Cable's direction has been every which way but true.

The recording and motion-picture industries have hounded broadband providers to police their pipes for file-sharing pirates. These advocacy groups want service providers to monitor and stop the illegal trafficking of files. AT&T has a filtering plan that Slate calls "baffling"; it would scan all emails and downloads for illicit content. But Time Warner Cable has found a much simpler way to deter film and music pirates — make them pay for bandwidth.

Are you among the almost 14 percent of households to have abandoned landlines in favor of cell phones, but still want to get DSL broadband Internet? If so, AT&T has finally begun offering so-called "naked" DSL. Naked DSL was framed as a concession to consumer groups and the FCC when AT&T acquired BellSouth. But it's actually just good business.

Check out this screenshot of how Rogers, a large Canadian broadband provider, modified the Google homepage for subscribers. It's sure to get advocates for network neutrality — the notion that Internet service providers should not discriminate between websites — all riled up. Sure, they'll say, the ISP only inserted a public service message to its users this time, but what's to stop Rogers from inserting a banner ad, or limiting Google bandwidth to give its partner, Yahoo, an edge? After the jump, a closeup of the controversial message.