That Martin and his puritanical cronies get kicked to the kerb.

Perhaps the government would like to provide free internet access so its online services could be used, poorer people can have a way of accessing job-sites and sending emails.

I know the content filters are pretty rubbish, but if I were a US taxpayer, the free delivery of porn would not be high on my list of things I would want to pay for. It doesn't have to be perfect, should err on the side of permissiveness and shouldn't be sold/bought on the basis of censorship. I'd block torrent traffic too, not because of the possible legal status of the content, but because there is no real need for it. I'd also put in some decent anti-spam system, which might be a bit of a novelty for the US.

It isn't necessarily censorship (though it may be dressed that way to get red-state approval), it might just be keeping unnecessary traffic off what is likely to be a poorly resourced network infrastructure.

Paris, poorly resourced she aint.

As the FCC have just approved the use of whitespace with religious zeal, relying on faith rather than any working physical proof of concept, it should come as no surprise they are backing a puritanical service which also wont work in the way they are expecting and cause considerable difficulties to legitimate users.

There you go again -- bitching about something that would be free and not even available to most of you!

I like the bit about job-finding as one of the potential uses. It should be geared toward utilitarian uses and definitely NOT toward dissemination of pr0n, torrents and the like.

We have an expression over here that you probably have heard before: Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Mine's the asbestos-lined one...

This network should be separate from the "real" internet, with things like email allowed to filter through(the onus would be on webmail providers to create a govweb interface). Since it's being provided on the taxpayer dime, it should be extremely selective about what's let on it.

Scotty, beam me up. I'm tired of living down here in la-la land. Turns out there's no free lunch.