A quarter of Alabamians live in homes without internet access

The rural poverty of the Black Belt isn't an equitable thing with easy pay bills, computer using jobs, and government assistance. All those things are hard to do by design. The Black Belt was 1/2 shares share cropping when slavery was banned. And the cropping was cotton. You can't eat cotton. To get food you got to sell it to the only buyer around. And the buyers were the people who figured half of all your family produced was fair exchange for a tar paper shack and a loaned mule to make you more productive. Or rather you and your family. Mom pop and the little ones working the field year round.

I regularly drive through Alabama on the way to Florida (from Atlanta). One time, I took a wrong turn and ended up in a small town with absolutely no cell signal and closed roads everywhere. We stopped and asked a local for directions. This was SE of Dothan, AL, I think.

And several times, Google Maps has routed me through areas where I no longer have a signal (south-central AL). Once when this happened, the road it wanted me to go on was closed and it couldn't download an update. I handled this one by just driving northish, knowing that I'd hit Montgomery eventually.

Are you starting a charity or an LLC to build the infrastructure?

Are you going to invest in a company working to expand access?

Or so you just mean that someone else in the "we" collective needs to do something?

But you get a discount on electric installation if you sign up for your new service online.

Internet service isn't just entertainment: It is communication, banking, and lots of very basic things folks need in life. It just happens to be multi-purpose, so you get the entertainment value as well.

Many jobs require internet access to apply: Fewer and fewer take any sort of paper applications and not everywhere has kiosks to apply and test at (low paying jobs, at least). Heck, game disks are getting rarer, so you sometimes need to be online to use a PC game. Lots of research for school papers is done online.

Also, communication. Few folks send snail mail letters anymore due to email. Chat programs work well too.

If you aren't connected to the internet, you are at a disadvantage. I cannot say that about television in general or a football match - going without those sometimes means you don't have as much to talk about with folks that consume those.

> By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but what ever the customs of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-laborer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into, without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England.

If yes, then let's do it. If not, then let's not. No need to argue about whether it's some ineffable "right" or not, which ultimately comes down to personal philosophy.

>The majority of households in four rural counties - Perry, Monroe, Conecuh and Greene - don’t have any sort of internet access

> Mississippi has the worst mark in the country. Thirty percent of households there don’t have any access to the World Wide Web.

make it clear they are talking about "ability to access the internet from their house by any means" not just a dedicated broadband connection at home. So that would also include people who don't own smartphones and/or tablets and people who have no cell phone service at home.