On top of that, if you want to drive companies to offer broadband everywhere -- having services people want to use everywhere that require broadband is pretty damn important.
It will have the reverse effect of drawing more people to where they can access those services and away from the areas where access to those services are limited due to inadequate internet services which will erode the motivation to provide broadband to those places.
One of the many reasons urbanisation is trending upwards.
I don't know about that. Here in Kazakhstan many villages gained relatively high-speed ADSL (up to 8 Mb/s, usually 4 Mb/s) in the past 4-5 years. Most of them are not exactly flourishing either: imagine something like Detroit (from what I've seen), but on a much smaller scale. At least it didn't stop them from streaming the trendy Hollywood crap everyone talks about.