The excellent PBS Spacetime series has a great video digging into this topic.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dsCjRjA4O7Y

I think this is literally the episode "Be Right Back" of Black Mirror.

I think that Rick Marks fellow has one of those PhDs. See EyeToy entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_Toy

s/Mr/Dr/g

It's actually better than that. The city didn't want to short change local ISPs, so they decided not to be an ISP themselves, but rather lease the lines dirt cheep. They couldn't come up with a way to differentiate between me and a large company, so they decided to provide an IP and DNS for $15 a month, with disadvantages to try and discourage individuals from circumventing ISPs. No news, email, tech support, but if you have the slightest idea what you are doing, you can apt-get at over 350kps for dirt cheep!