Has anything less drastic been tried? Like, for example, making Internet access only available to one computer in the household?
If one believes that home Internet access is a bad value proposition I could see that, I guess, but this is such a foreign view point that I don't see how I could have anything to add.
Books? I have a Kindle. TV? I don't have cable, I subscribe to Netflix and Hulu+. Cooking? I find many recipes online. Purchasing things? I buy a lot on Amazon. Keeping in touch with friends? Email, gchat, IRC, facebook, etc.
The Internet isn't a product. It isn't even a technology. It's an efficient overlay communication network. If you communicate with the outside world it can make everything you do better. If one doesn't, then maybe one has no purpose for it but then I have no purpose for that viewpoint because that life doesn't even exist to me.
I had no internet in my apt for a few months, and it was also right after I had moved to a new city (it was semi-accidental, due to bullshit with a "pre-wired for ethernet" apartment that I took way longer to give up on than I should have). The mixture of having no internet and not much else in the apt was interesting. It was easier to unwind at the end of the day; go home, cook, read a magazine or book, go to bed. There just wasn't enough in the house to keep me up.
It's true that when you have the internet, with all the information and possibilities, it's like I have both an entire library and an entire workshop always available to me. And how am I going to go to sleep in the middle of all that? But I think it was also important I didn't have much else in my apartment at the time; if I had had a bunch of dead-tree encyclopedias, novels, magazines, etc., I would've just read those.