Comment by TulliusCicero

As a general principle it's fine. The issue is a combination of:

* Providing infrastructure and services for rural areas like this is inherently monumentally expensive.

* For most people, rural living is some kind of choice: most could likely move to a cheap suburb that could be served much more easily, but don't want to.

* Far from having more money to fund things like this, rural areas are actually much less economically productive per person, on average. Of course you need some people to farm, but in practice you have many more people than that.

Essentially, society is providing a heavy subsidy for a lifestyle choice for most people, with no compelling government interest there.

While I do think we should make a goal of hooking everyone up to decent internet, any sensible plan has to look at how we can do this efficiently. Absolutely bare minimum, we should be superceding local zoning laws and similar that often make it illegal for people to build more densely in these areas (small town city centers), such that people can individually choose to live in a more efficient way in the same general area if they want. Not talking about skyscrapers obviously, but traditional, walkable downtowns with townhomes or duplexes would be a great thing.

Some Americans may scoff at this, but you don't need large numbers of people to get walkable neighborhoods. I've been through Bavarian villages of a few hundred people that were more walkable than US cities 100x their size.

It's especially nonsensical that we'd heavily subsidize super low density living when that's basically always gonna be worse for the environment. It means you need much more land per person, obviously, so you gotta cut into nature more, plus higher energy requirements.