There might be nothing wrong with spending $500 million to expand broadband coverage to parts of New York not likely to get such service without a major governmental effort.

Those promoting the idea liken it to another government sponsored program, the Rural Electrification Administration, a New Deal campaign to bring electricity to rural areas that utilities said were too sparsely populated to justify the expense of installing lines.

Today, it is hard to imagine life anywhere without electricity. The push behind the broadband initiative makes the same case for this new service, one crucial for students who need to do research from home, for businesses that need access to customers, and for anyone else who hopes to participate in the culture and commerce of the day.

The millions will not go directly into cables and servers. The money will be used as a matching fund to inspire Internet service providers to go where they say they have not been able to afford to go before.

Yet when a reporter for Capital New York approached the three largest of those providers — Frontier, Time-Warner and Verizon — in early April as final details of the state budget were taking shape, all declined to comment on their interest in the program.

And although the vague guidelines for spending the money do not rule out municipal participation similar to the municipal utility companies that in some cases helped expand access to electricity so many decades ago, they do not encourage it either.

David Salway, head of the new state Broadband Program Office, which will be instrumental in deciding how the money gets spent, stresses that the goal is to make the money available for partnership with private firms and not to use any of it for construction of the infrastructure necessary to deliver broadband services.

“We see this as a provider partnership process,” Salway told Capital New York, adding that the state is “wary” of “the government building and competing with the private sector.”

As it stands, with funding in place and guidelines for spending it still to come, the initiative has drawn criticism from both ends of the political spectrum. The conservative Empire Center for Public Policy portrayed it as crony capitalism: “the only clear beneficiaries of this program will be cable and internet providers, who will have a new state subsidy to expand their footprints into areas in which their competitors have demonstrated an inability to operate profitably.” Advocates for rural areas worry that the providers will take the government money and in return offer only a minimum level of service to those who now have none, leaving them still far behind the more populated parts of the state.

This lack of detail and level of distrust takes a bit of the shine off the glowing reviews of the program coming both from the governor’s people and those in rural areas who want to believe all they have been promised.

This money might yet deliver high speed access to those who now do not have it, but there’s not much in writing at this point with details on where, when or how that will happen.

© 2015 Times Herald-Record