America needs a public option for the internet

Private industry is strangling America's internet. The government needs to step in.

Internet in the U.S. has become a tangled mess.
(Image credit: Michael Bocchieri/Getty Images)

In the hardscrabble Texas hill country where Lyndon Johnson grew up, he was long remembered as the man who "brought the lights."

In a place where the water table is often 75 feet below ground, rural wives had to work like draft horses, hauling water day after day for drinking, cooking, and above all washing. So when LBJ, during his first term in Congress, badgered FDR into putting up a hydroelectric dam in his district, and then twisted enough arms at the Rural Electrification Administration so they would bend their rules about where new electric lines could be built, hill country Texans were pole-vaulted out of a brutally difficult medieval lifestyle. Suddenly they had electric refrigerators, pumps, and washing machines. It was miraculous.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.