The thing about electricity is that people couldn't see that it would service more than just lights.
I think it's safe to assume most people don't realize the full potential of the internet, either. Honestly, I don't feel I know much of anything myself about where the internet is going; there are just too many possibilities to forsee.
Unless you have some WAN technology I don't know about or are accepting the issues of broadband over power, I think it's hard to convince someone that a traditional infrastructure covering--say--all of the Ozarks is going to be worth a whole lot more than the few towns and cities in it that are already covered.
Actually, an interesting possibility for covering very large areas is by using waves in the upper RF ranges. These would allow for huge swaths of sparsely populates land to be covered with relatively high-speed service. Of course, it will never be top-notch service, and that's something one must accept about living in rural areas. However, saying rural areas should be relegated to use minimal or no internet service is absurd. I first managed to get my parents off of dial-up this past summer, upgrading to a wireless signal from a tower ~1 mile away. Even so, they still don't get enough bandwidth to use skype or stream youtube videos smoothly, but the alternative was sticking with terrible dial-up on failing (verizon) landlines. Simply put, we have the technology, but we need to make it profitable for someone to implement.
Although the correlation is not universal, geographies with high instances of software piracy suffer from high instances of malware.
These areas also suffer from high instances of computers...
The only thing America is interested in is profit and fear mongering.
What more do you need?
A list is only as strong as its weakest link. -- Don Knuth