When asked about his scepticism with regards to broadband, the minister attributed the high take-up of broadband in South Korea to pornography.
"My scepticism has really been about whether there is any compelling national interest in the Government spending money on subsidising roll-outs to consumers," Alston commented to ABC reporter Alan Kohler. "Because at the moment it's pretty much more of the same but a bit faster for most consumers."
Geoff Johnson, vice-president and research director for Gartner in Australia, commented that broadband was predominantly used for online gamming and share trading in the commercial sector, and a raft of business applications in the enterprise sector.
"Narrowband is just too slow to do a lot of business applications," Johnson said. "There is no doubt that pornography is of concern to the minister, but all you need to do is go into the commercial areas of any of the major cities and you can see people connecting to broadband via Kiosks. These are business people, students, tradesmen, and they are doing things like e-mail or share trading using broadband. It has many important relevant uses."
Rosemary Sinclair, managing director of the Australian Telecommunications Users Group, said that although entertainment was a key driver of broadband uptake, online education also played an important role.
"People who get sniffy about applications such as games because they aren't relevant to them are missing out on a generational relevance," Sinclair said. "The Internet has a central role in the lives of kids, which is not readily understood in the minds of our policy-makers. Computers aren't something they learn about, they are a tool the kids learn with."
Sinclair said the argument that broadband uptake was reliant on content and application availability was a poor one, given the experiences of the UK, where a drop in pricing dramatically increased uptake.
"Broadband is a communications platform, rather than an entertainment distribution platform. People create content on their own terms," Sinclair said.
Alan Jones, regional production director for Yahoo South Asia, commented that the high penetration of broadband in the Korean market was enabling the company to roll out a series of Internet-based premium services.
"Yahoo users can download a new release and watch it on their computers for about the cost of renting a DVD," Jones said. "We are certainly not delivering any pornography, in our experience the primary drivers for broadband are people wanting to do the same things on the Internet only they want to do them faster."
Long-time campaigner for reduced wholesales prices on bandwidth, Ozemail CEO Justine Milne, described the Minister's comments as "not very helpful" in promoting broadband uptake in Australia.
Given the pioneering role of porn in making the internet pay, I think Alston just gave broadband huge boost. Any publicity is good publicity.