For advocates of strong protections for anonymous speech and the Internet, online chat rooms are the 21st-century successors to the town square and the political pamphlet.

"There's a long tradition in U.S. history of at least anonymous political speech, and certainly when you contemplate the Internet and the new opportunities it offers, this is the way a lot of speech happens," Sam Bayard, assistant director of the Citizens Media Law Project at Harvard Law School, said in an interview.

At the same time, however, many argue that the First Amendment should not become a shield for those responsible for defamatory remarks. The reach of the Internet has allowed anonymous speech to potentially influence more people than ever, compounding the harm of a false claim.

John Donovan, AT&T’s chief technology officer, said the company might string fiber optic cables to its customers’ homes in the future. But he argues that it was a smarter choice to try to get as much life out of the copper wire as possible, betting the cost of fiber will drop over time.

“The last thing we want to do is overdeploy fixed capacity into the ground where there is no recovery for being wrong by putting in too much,” he said. “The ideal way to deploy technology is on the last day as fast as possible, because it gets more capable and cheaper every day.”