As usual, Bruce Sterling says it more colorfully:

(((I’ve been doing a lot of video blogging on BEYOND THE BEYOND lately, which must be annoying to readers who don’t have broadband. But look: outside the crass duopoly of the USA’s pitifully inadequate broadband, digital video is gushing right through the cracks. There’s just no getting away from it. There is so much broadband, so cheap and so widespread, that the video pirates are going out of business. I used to walk around Belgrade and there wasn’t a street-corner where some guy wasn’t hawking pirated plastic disks. Those crooks and hucksters are going away, their customers are all on YouTube or LimeWire…)))

(((“Vernacular video,” folks. It isn’t just for theorists any more.)))

— WIRED Blogs: Listening Post, by Bruce Sterling, in Beyond the Beyond, 23 March 2007

Yes, he said Belgrade. Serbia: former Yugoslavia. They have broadband that makes the pokey speeds and availability in the U.S. look like horse and buggy days. But, then, so do many other countries.

The U.S. could, too, if it wanted to.

-jsq