Interesting NBN news

Loose thoughts by Bjorn Landfeldt

The government should be congratulated on the courageous plan to build a government/industry funded broadband network as announced earlier today. Coming from outside Australia and seeing the close to monopoly position Telstra currently have one may wonder why this has not happened before. Perhaps now we can get SIP pops and IPTV plus video on demand like civilised countries. This will inevitably open up opportunities for innovation and service roll out in Australia. If the government combine the one laptop per child, NBN and a building policy that each home should have at least one networked computer as minimum standard as is the case in countries such as Sweden, perhaps Australia will be able to embrace this crazy thing called the Internet and start to take advantage of its enabling powers and information distribution capabilities.

One worry though; if the government owns the national backbone, wouldn't that be the perfect place for content filters? This way the government fully control the Internet and will not have to deal with irritating and questioning ISPs. THey don't even need to tell the general public they are doing it, shhhhhhh.