One of Kevin Rudd’s main goals is to implement a blazingly fast nation-wide 100Mb/s national broadband network, at a cost of around $43b. This would place Australia at the pinnacle of world broadband networks. Frankly, I can’t think of a single bigger waste of tax-payer’s money than this (especially when we are due to run huge deficits). After all, what does one use 100Mb/s for? Movies, music and porn – that’s it. I’m a fairly heavy internet user, yet I can’t for the life of me think how I would use anywhere near 100Mb/s. You don’t need 100Mb/s to check your email. You don’t need 100Mb/s to do research for your high school essay. You don’t need 100Mb/s to chat to your Mum over Skype. All you need it for is BitTorrent. Should the government really be spending several tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer’s money on subsidizing BitTorrent? I don’t think so – especially given that governments around the world are spending billions of dollars trying to fight copyright infringement. It would be much more cost effective to subsidize rental video outlets and adult stores, which would have the same effect for a fraction of the cost.

I see two possibilities for how this scheme could develop. First, given that it is estimated that use of the network by the end user will cost around $200/month, there is a very real possibility that few people will want to pay the price to use it, in which case the resources will have been wasted. Alternately, lots of people might start using the network for its speed which will put private sector ISPs out of business, since they will be unable to compete against this newly created, heavily subsidized behemoth. This could have devastating implications for the telecommunications industry and might effectively socialize this critical sector of the economy. Either of these possibilities is undesirable.

In Australia, like in other developed countries, the market has proven very effective at providing broadband services to our residents. If a 100Mb/s network hasn’t already developed in the market, this is probably a fairly good indication that such a network would be economically unviable and therefore shouldn’t be pursued by the government.

This post has been cross-posted at the Australian Libertarian Society’s blog – Thoughts on Freedom.