Broadband issues are suddenly all over Washington. (The picture is courtesy the BBC.)

The issue is front-and-center because two big industries are in a push-and-tug over absolute power.

The two industries are the phone carriers, representing DSL technology, and the cable companies, representing cable modems.

They are tugging at each other because they have both won the right to stop wholesaling their capacity to competitive ISPs, so they figure they now have something to fight over. Not something to invest in, mind you, something to fight over.

The fight claims to be over taxation, but it's really about discrimination.

In order to get around the obvious concept that cable must wholesale capacity, the government simply redefined it as "information service," rather than what it is, telecommunications. This had the side-effect of making cable immune from the kinds of taxes phone companies pay. One result is that "stripped-down" DSL service, at $29.95/month, actually costs nearly what super-fast "cable modem" service does, about $40, after taxes and fees are added to both bills.

That's what the whole "broadband tax moratorium" was about, leveling the playing field between the Bells and the cable giants.

This was a weapon in that war. It's a study claiming that taxing DSL will hurt the overall economy and cost jobs.

Sounds terrible, right? The problem is, it's pure Astroturf. That is, the Bells funded the study. Its conclusions are non-scientific. It's just politics.

What I wanna know is why the media bought the lie that this was "independent" research by an "independent" group. The facts were easy to get, and the media's laziness in this -- its continual laziness on this regarding all issues -- is the greatest scandal of our time.

It's not like the identification is hard to get, or hard to make. But if the press won't do its job, and the people aren't informed, then democracy can become a dead letter.