blog Over at the Sydney Morning Herald, apparently veteran journalist Stuart Washington has made an *extremely complex* argument for why the National Broadband Network is a silly policy. He writes:

“I wait, say, a couple of years, and get a service that is broadly the same price as I am paying now. The new service allows me to do more of what I am already doing and to do it faster, although my existing service offers me enough for what I am doing right now. That doesn’t sound particularly compelling to me, yet it’s the basis for $36 billion in spending.”

Thank you for your commentary, Stuart. It brightened my day. However, I wanted to draw your attention to the fact that the National Broadband Network project is broadly intended to resolve, as I understand it, the following policy aims:

Increased competition in the telecommunications sector

Faster (bandwith and latency) broadband speeds over the next 50 years

Eliminating broadband blackspots

Increasing the ability of telcos to compete in regional areas where monopoly backhaul conditions exist

The structural separation of Telstra

Investment in Australia’s digital economy

Boosting national productivity and efficiency

In your article, you appear to have addressed none of these. Your argument to the effect that I don’t need it personally, therefore the entire NBN policy is a waste of space is therefore invalid. In addition, we recommend you do some more research before writing your next commentary. We’ve just had half a decade of debate about the NBN policy. You don’t appear to have read a single jot of it.

Next!

Image credit: Amphetamine Dreams