Okay, time for my take on it.........
Why should my tax dollars pay for rural internet service? Free market, free enterprise, if it feels it is profitable enough, will provide DSL to rural areas, if not, it won’t.
This is just another goverment intervention into the marketplace.
And, of course, if the government gets involved, there will be strings attached, like everything else it gets involved with.
The question should not be whether or not this part of the bill is good or not.
The question should be, “Why is this provision necessary in the first place?”
Where I am at (rural area) we have DSL, but service with 768k download / 128k upload costs ~ $50 / month. Not cheap, if one is on a very limited income. So, it could be argued a lot of rural conservatives find decent Internet access hard to afford. I stuck with dial-up as long as possible, but, time is money, and if one is doing much on the Internet at all, the time cost of dialup becomes even more atrocious. That doesn’t even count the download times if one has more than one computer to keep updated, etc. The phone line literally becomes almost continually tied up.
A rough analogy might be the subsidies to the rural electric coops, and rural telecos. Those subsidies might be considered examples of excessive government, but without them, those of us in rural areas who are not wealthy might still not have electrical or phone service.
Internet access is surely not as important as electrical service, but, it is approaching the importance of phone service for many, many people, and surpasses it for some. I find our family / my little business approaching that category, myself.