That's the premise, at least of Wired's Nicholas Thompson, writing for Washington Monthly:

Think of the Internet as working at different layers. There are all the pipes that go into your home, and then there’s all the stuff on your screen—from e-mail to eMule. The telecom companies like AT&T control the pipes; the software companies, like Google, create the stuff.

In an ideal world, both these layers would be sites of great innovation and creativity. But in the United States, that isn’t so. The software industry may seem like a team of Gandalfs, constantly producing magic. But the average telecom company resembles Jabba the Hut: it moves slowly and slobbers a lot.

To flesh out the context a bit, the U.S. is still at the bleeding edge of the software layer. It's no accident that Google and YouTube and Facebook and MySpace and eBay and Twitter and [insert almost every other major Internet innovation of the last 20 years] blossomed here. But where we're not so hot is at the next level down, i.e. our broadband tubes, the cable and phone company duopoly, and regulation of our communications industry. Enter McCain:

John McCain’s culpability is both specific and philosophical. For much of the Clinton and Bush administrations, he chaired the Senate Commerce Committee, overseeing the Federal Communications Commission and the telecom industry. Just before taking the post, he voted against the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the one big effort to solve the problem of anemic competition in the telecom sector.

Leaving aside the last two weeks or so, McCain has long been a proud deregulation-minded legislator. And, the argument goes, that free-market industry-centric approach that's triumphed on Capitol Hill, at the FCC, and elsewhere in DC over the last few decades fostered the situation we're in -- where technological innovation in the U.S. is on the cusp of being frustrated by an environment that lags behind the rest of the world when it comes to the nuts and bolts of communications.

But that's a tough argument and expect most people to make and make sense of, I think. So much of that way of thinking gets poured into this "John McCain doesn't know how to email" idea that seems to be have some legs this campaign season.