David Cake

I'll just note for the record my strong opposition to internet censorship, but I know it is not the topic here. The digital economy itself, by which I mean that part of the economy that is primarily about the supply of services that are supplied purely over digital communications such as the internet, is an important but slightly misses the point. The real point is the extent to which the economy, overall, is becoming digital. For example, we don't think of banks as part of the digital economy, we just think of them as part of the economy, and they have buildings and branches and a lot of interaction with the physical world -- but for many people, online access is becoming the primary way that they interact with their bank, and essential for day to day management of their finances. Increasingly, many specialist products are available outside a very small number of (generally CBD only) specialist shops only via purchase from internet vendors. This trend makes issues of access and equity essential -- it is not just that those without online access will miss out on access to new services, they will also increasingly miss out on access to services in all areas of the economy as they move online. So don't think about the digital economy -- think about the digitisation of the economy. That is the big issue -- and is enough to justify access to the internet. On the general subject of internet access, BTW, the need for fast broadband is overstated. What we need far more is back end bandwidth. Many internet connections are sold with high speed, but monthly bandwidth allocations that could be used up in a few hours of regular use! Many emerging internet services -- internet radio, podcasting and videocasting, etc -- work perfectly well with current high end DSL connections available in many Australian cities, but are attached to plans that make these services too expensive for regular access. The NBN process seemed to focus on delivering faster, more expensive, internet, when the real access issues is price, particularly bandwidth price -- and the NBN promise of more expensive, much faster, connections without serious back end investment just sounds like it will enable people to afford smaller allocations that they can use up faster. In order to encourage the actual digital economy, online services such as social networking sites etc, what we need to do is to encourage our small innovative entrepeneurs. Our larger companies like Telstra are embarrasing, for example the Telstra owned Sensis search industry (whitepages.com.au etc) is tragicly poorly implemented in terms of usefulness of returned search results etc -- if they would just sell it to Google, everybody would be better off. We need more of a local venture capital market, and more programs to help entrepeneurs meet and liase with overseas industry leaders would help a lot too. Paradoxically, while our large tech companies are often flailingly bad such as Sensis, most of our large corporations in other sectors are doing very well globally. I heard a story this year of someone in Silicon Valley boasting that their bank had introduced a new service to mail out regular cheques automatically -- a service that seems incredibly quaint to Australians who have been enjoying electronic direct debits for years. Many of our large corporations, and particularly many of our government departments, lead the world in online access to their services. I don't think we need a lot of government effort to support what we seem to be doing very well. What we need is support for, not fast deluxe services, but access to guaranteed minimum levels of service accessible to all. One last point -- I've been living in Alice Springs this year, a remote regional hub, but quite a large one, not a tiny village by any means -- and the lack of understanding of regional service by many major corporations is very visible. Optus people kept telling me to 'visit my local Optus shop', without understanding that my local dealer was 1500kms away! Extending quality digital services to regional area is hard, and I fully understand the many complex decisions the government faces in trying to make it happen -- but its going to be far easier to extend digital services to regional areas than it has ever been to extend physical branch offices, so for large parts of Australia, access to the digital economy is their best hope for full access to the economy in total.