The online magazine Motherboard recently ran a feel-good story about a community of British farmers in Lancashire who dug their own ditches to put down Internet fiber. The background was the ever so typical story about the big telecos not bothering with sparsely populated areas because it's not worth the investment on their bottom line. So the a local group got together and found that they might as well build their own high-speed connection. Any nothing should stop them from doing that, right?

Well, the article also mentions a few similar stories from "The Land of the Free", where digging your own ditch is now legislated against. In the interest of the free market economy, of course. Parallels are drawn to big company lobbying and FUD in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when rural communities formed their own electric utilities. It states optimistically that there are to this day thousands of local communities with local electric services, but also that most of it was (and is) consolidated into a small group of companies.

Another interesting approach to Internet build-out which is mentioned is Google's Fiber project, with Kansas City as the Guinea pig. However, there the roll-out is in "big company" fashion, with marketing "threats" of missing the boat if they don't sign up NOW. Not your friendly farmer dig-out, in other words.

Regardless of strategy though, the local, sometimes DIY, approach to physical layer last-mile build-out fits very well with the scale-free network topology of the Internet. It is with this kind of ungoverned and unplanned growth it thrives best. Legislating against it of course make no sense at all, but waiting for a big tele or cable company to do the job should really not be encouraged either.

Again, small and decentralized triumphs over big and inefficient. It's simply the way of the future.