Economist Joshua Gans has taken up my cause of “what the hell do we need fast broadband for?” in CoreEcon More broadband in Crikey and the ABC – he asks, “why should we give money/monopoly rights/subsidization to Telstra to create a higher speed network? If there was some economic benefit in it then it would fund itself.”
Would someone please ask Kevin Rudd that same question? Please don’t spend $10b of my taxes so that pimply-faced teenagers can download porn faster.
Japan and Korea has pervasive 100Mb networks. Has there been a big business uptake? No, they’re using that bandwidth for gaming. Don’t get me wrong, gaming’s great and all, but I’d rather you spent my tax dollars on… I dunno… stopping global warming. If I want to game, let me spend my money on it, not the taxpayers’.
It used to be that TV was the opiate of the masses. Now it appears to be downloadable video is.
Agreed. I make $35 an hour and that’s more than enough for gaming if I want to spend it on that (actually I’m more likely to spend it on a 24″ widescreen plasma display). And why isn’t $10b of our taxes going to something important to the future of humans like stopping global warming or feeding starving children in Africa? You’d almost think we wanted our race to go extinct.