Lester Beall produced a series of posters promoting the Rural Electrification Agency (REA) during the 1930s and '40s. The REA promoted electricity not as a way to make money, but as a way to make life easier.

The story of how the federal government helped bring electricity to rural America teaches an important lesson to those who are now deciding how to spend $7 billion on extending broadband to the countryside. It’s this:

Cost is just as important as build-out. In fact, affordability of broadband is probably more important than its availability.

The comparison of electric service and broadband isn’t exact, of course. But it is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the lessons we can learn from the last government-sponsored effort to bring massive infrastructural improvements to rural areas — that of the rural electrification movement of the 1920s and '30s.

Live Journal Communications in the U.S. have been haunted since the 19th Century by commercial, judicial and even romantic interests. Many of the pioneers of what we now call "net neutrality" were rural Americans. The current battle over net neutrality has deep roots, oddly enough, in rural America.

In 1891, a Kansas undertaker named Almon Strowger patented the first telephone switch. His innovation, he would later say, was compelled by a local telephone operator who limited calls to his business while favoring calls to his competitor, with whom she was romantically involved.

The telephone switch, in turn, enabled federal “common carrier” rules to ensure non-discriminatory treatment of all phone calls, a regulatory regime which has governed our nation's telephone system for more than 100 years. But there's more to the net neutrality back-story.

In the 1950s, a Texas cattle rancher named Thomas Carter believed he could connect a two-way radio to the telephone back at his ranch-house, allowing him to make calls while riding his far-flung ranch on horseback. By 1958, his CarterPhone was working and ready to market. But AT&T cried foul, claiming this new application might harm its network. A 10-year legal battle ensued. It ended when the Federal Communications Commission approved the CarterPhone rule, which stated that innovative applications could connect if they did no harm to the network.