For over a decade, the United States has promoted a free and open Internet as a central tenet of its foreign policy. To date, this has most visibly involved shaming governments that limit access to online content and developing tools that help individuals circumvent censorship and surveillance.

You might not guess it from your Internet bill, but the United States has some of the cheapest broadband in the world -- right up there with Kazakhstan, India and Bangladesh. That’s one of many surprising, and occasionally puzzling, revelations in a new report from the International Telecommunication Union, which tracks the use, cost and penetration of information networks around the world.