Better Internet access could rejuvenate rural America, but how do you get it there?

Fiber optic cables carrying internet providers are seen running into a server room at Intergate.Manhattan, a data center owned and developed by Sabey Data Center Properties, during a tour of the facility in lower Manhattan, in New York, March 20, 2013. REUTERS/Mike Segar

A century ago, a popular song sheet wondered, "How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?" Would America's doughboys resolve themselves to the so-slow rhythms of rural life after they'd tasted cosmopolitan Europe? 

In the generations since World War I, the question's been answered. Rural America has been losing its people without pause. Mechanisation created bigger farms with fewer farmhands, the towns that made a trade from farming families hollowed out, and so on.