It is the same old story from me on broadband today in the Australian Financial Review but my quotes to John Davidson came up nicely. They are over the fold. (Just an aside in case I get comments again on my Star Wars knowledge. Watch the DVD extras and you will see high speed broadband across the Pacific being used by George Lucas. He didn’t manage to do it using the force, there was real infrastructure there somewhere). 

An economist at Melbourne Business School, Joshua Gans, argues that in any case there may not be enough public benefit from a national high-speed broadband network to justify a large investment of public money.

Many of the benefits of high-speed broadband, such as watching movies and TV shows streaming off the internet in real time, or ready access to pirated movies, TV shows, music and pornography, are private benefits that ordinarily wouldn’t warrant government assistance, he says.

(Even though wathcing a pirated porn flick is arguably a productivity gain in pure econometric terms, it’s probably not the sort of gain politicians have in mind when they say that the economy needs a broadband upgrade.)

Besides, says Gans, many areas of Australia alreay have world-class internet access — how could Star Wars have been made in Sydney if the internet link with George Lucas’s studio in the US wasn’t a fast one? — and those regions that don’t already have access to fast internet don’t always have an urgent need for it.

“My suspicion is that there will be areas where the government needs to invest to get to the highest-speed broadband, if that’s the goal, but it doesn’t have to be everywhere immediately in one big bang,” Gans says.

“And if people can’t wait, then they have to move to areas where it’s already available,” Gans says.