Spending cuts are the theme of the Senate's compromise draft of legislation meant to inject cash into a flagging economy. Those include a $2 billion reduction in money for rural broadband deployment, bringing the total down to $7 billion—though that's still more than the $6 billion allocated for broadband in the House version of the bill.

There's also disagreement about who will control whatever funds are allocated: the original Senate language puts the money in the hands of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, but some Senators prefer the House bill's strategy of splitting the cash between NTIA and the Department of Agriculture. All of this leaves the prospects for this spending, which still faces a House-Senate reconciliation, very uncertain.

The prospect of an unprecedented federal outlay on broadband deployment, politically unimaginable a year ago, has brought together some strange bedfellows in recent months. For the first time, it seemed as though advocacy groups like Free Press and Public Knowledge, corporations normally on frosty terms (such as AT&T and Google), and techie academics were all singing from the same hymnal. With the total spending package expected to top $820 billion, and President Obama pledging to invest in high-tech infrastructure, some groups dared to hope for a broadband windfall as large as $44 billion

It didn't take long for the serpents to emerge in Eden, of course. Telecoms—and Republicans—have balked at the "open access" strings on those federal dollars; these are vague in terms of practical significance, but seen by many as a backdoor imposition of net neutrality regulation. An untimely Pew survey appeared to show that two-thirds of putatively "underserved" Americans without broadband simply don't want it.

Meanwhile, the value of broadband spending as "stimulus" has come into question. Robert Crandall, the Brookings Institution scholar whose research has been used to justify ambitious claims about broadband's ability to produce jobs, has complained that his findings have been misused, and called assertions that each percentage point increase in broadband adoption could generate 300,000 jobs a "gross overstatement." A recent editorial in The Economist argued that money is better spent on other projects if the goal is to create near-term job growth—in part because government dollars may simply displace private funding.

There's also, of course, disagreement about how "stimulus" money would be managed. Already, a Minnesota task force has removed several municipal broadband efforts—frowned upon by some private telecoms as unwelcome competition—from a list of "shovel-ready" projects, in part because "state officials will have less control over how the federal money is spent than was previously thought."

Which federal agencies will have a say in the outlays is also a bone of contention; both the telecoms and advocacy groups like Free Press would prefer control of the money to be centralized under the supervision of the NTIA, rather than split between Commerce and Agriculture. But the telecoms are less sanguine about giving the Federal Communications Commission a role—for more or less the same reason that the advocacy groups favor it: it's likely to mean more regulatory strings.

A cloture vote on the final stimulus bill—expected to be razor thin, with only a few Republicans crossing the aisle to join Democrats, who need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster threat—is slated for Monday. Assuming that passes, a vote on the bill itself will likely come Tuesday.