Cerf’s Up! ‘Father of Internet’ Praises National Broadband Network

Vint Cerf in Vilnius, Lithuania,
September 2010

The man widely regarded as one of the ‘fathers of the Internet’, Vint Cerf, is currently on a ‘working holiday’ in Australia where, in his current role as Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, he has been talking up the Government’s National Broadband Network (NBN) at every opportunity.

We have written here before about the NBN project, most recently upon the release of the business plan towards the end of last year.  We believe that effective innovation requires the support of suitable infrastructure, and that the NBN will be an important component of that infrastructure in the future.

It seems that Vint Cerf shares our views in this regard. 

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Tags: Amazon 1-click, Australia, Broadband, News

Australia’s National Broadband Network Business Plan Released

The Patentology blog is – appropriately enough – primarily about patents, law and practice.  But patents (or, at least, those patents worth having) are essentially incentives for, and by-products of, innovation.  And we believe that innovation will only happen effectively and efficiently when supported by appropriate infrastructure.

This is why we think that Australia’s proposed National Broadband Network (NBN) is an important project.  It is why we identified broadband policy as the major innovation-related issue in the recent federal election, and why we agreed substantially with the views expressed by Jonathan Coppel (Economic Counsellor to the OECD Secretary General) when he said back in September that:

Good infrastructure facilitates trade, bolsters market integration and competition, fosters the dissemination of ideas and innovation and enhances access to resources and public services. These benefits are particularly important for Australia because of its size, geographical dispersion of the population and production centres and distance from other major markets.

Australia cannot rely upon open competition to deliver universal access to quality broadband service, because there are vast areas of the continent where it is simply not profitable to deliver such a service at prices that are affordable to the local communities.  Additionally, a population of 22 million people cannot reasonably afford to pay for duplication of expensive infrastructure in order to facilitate ‘competition’ in those geographic areas where there are substantial profits to be made.

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Tags: Australia, Broadband, Innovation policy