I wonder if this counts as ironic: I sat down a few minutes ago to write about the government’s efforts to stimulate broadband access around the country. My initial attempt lasted less than a minute, halted in its tracks by a sudden interruption of the P-D’s broadband Internet connection.

So for 30 minutes or so, the newsroom was plunged back into the dark ages - before high-speed Internet came along.

The brief outage prompted one of my younger co-workers, Adam, to ponder the life of a reporter without the Internet. “What was it like back in the old days?” he asked - though not in those exact words. Made me shiver.

And that brings us back to the orginal purpose of this post. The Obama administration has freed up several billion dollars of that federal stimulus money for the purpose of encouraging the spread of high-speed Internet to rural and underserved areas.

Interestingly, according to the article at Wired.com, the money comes with some strings that might cause some of the biggest players - AT&T and Verizon, for example - to keep their distance from the free, or at least cheap, government funding.

That’s because the government is insisting that any networks built with this money adhere to strict net neutrality guidelines.

For instance, all applicants have to agree to follow the FCC’s fair internet principles, which require ISPs to let users choose whatever devices and applications they like, without interference from the carrier. The nation’s wireless industry has resisted having those rules apply to them, since it would force them to tear down the walls around their networks. That means letting users bring their own devices to a mobile network, use competing video services on their phones, and use their mobile phones as modems for a laptop without an extra charge.