Life in the Slow Lane: The Pew Internet Project is out with a paper claiming that broadband adoption (infoworld.com/3433) in the United States has slowed dramatically, with the number of high-speed home users growing only 6 percent (12 percent annualized) in the first half of 2005, down from an annualized rate of 20 percent in 2003 and 2004. Currently, 53 percent of home Internet users have broadband, Pew says. A mind-boggling 32 percent of the U.S. adult population does not use the Internet at all. Wow.

What"s causing the slowdown? Do the stragglers just like that squeaky modem sound? Do they want to block the phone line from incoming calls? Or is it the cost? Pew singles out none of the above, instead hypothesizing that today"s dial-up users -- who are older, lower-income, less-educated, and more apathetic about the Internet -- just don"t want broadband that badly.

Should we subsidize broadband -- like we did 75 years ago with telephone service -- as a "basic service" critical to individual opportunity and national competitiveness? Or should we just let free markets do their work? My gut says wait -- the technology"s moving too fast to start subsidizing.