The leading beneficiaries of all these charges are the big multi-platform companies, the pipes for content and digital services -- among others, Comcast, Time-Warner, and Optimum, as well as the telecoms, Verizon and AT&T. With postal delivery in permanent decline and the inexorable shift to online management of family and business finances, the role of the broadband Internet is reaching a stage where anything less than total availability at minimal prices is a matter that deserves far more attention than it is currently getting. "Free" or virtually free and universal Internet has actually become indispensable, while access to high-speed service in the United States compares poorly to that in many other countries.

Perhaps the most critical appraisal of how our system has evolved comes in David Cay Johnston's book published last fall, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use Plain English to Rob You Blind. Introducing Johnston for an interview on public radio's On the Media, the host, Brooke Gladstone, cited a Commerce Department report that "100 million Americans do not have high speed Internet at home, largely because of high costs and the lack of available infrastructure." This puts a third of the country at a considerable disadvantage in conducting all sorts of activities, from schoolwork to job hunting and bill paying. Among Johnston's revelations in the book: The United States has gone from being first in terms of Internet speed -- as the place where the Internet was invented -- to twenty-ninth in the world, and it is still falling.

"We need to have public policies," Johnston asserted, "that recognize that the Internet is the key to economic growth in the 21st century and that the purpose of our government is not to funnel public resources to promote that of a handful of companies, notably Verizon and AT&T but to promote, as our Constitution says in its, Preamble, the general welfare, to make the country better off."

For now, the likelihood of fulfilling that objective seems remote. Bloomberg Businessweek reported last week that cable companies, confronted with widespread criticism, are preparing to roll out upgraded packages, or what Time-Warner calls "a $200-a-month concierge service" that "includes a 'certified technician' to customize your devices and a 'team of specially trained Personal Solutions Advisors'. ... Customers also get high-speed Internet at up to 50 megabits per second and two multiroom DVRs." In the 2012 American Customer Satisfaction Index ranking more than 225 companies, Businessweek said the four largest U.S. cable companies -- Comcast, Time-Warner Cable, Cox Communications, and Charter -- were all among the ten lowest-rated companies.

One promising initiative, at least as it applies to speed and access, comes from Google Fiber. This is a project the company is developing in Kansas City as a trial of what would be a far faster broadband network using fiber-optic communication. Milo Medin, Google's vice-president of Access Services, wrote in a blog post, "Access speeds have simply not kept pace with the phenomenal increases in computing power and storage capacity that's spurred innovation over the last decade." No other company can match Google's projected speed, but the price it is planning to charge for that service so far is higher than slower providers ($70 a month compared to about $50 for the telecom and cable companies).