Last week, Mark Pesce responded to my piece on city wireless broadband initiatives in Crikey:

Although Berg attempted to spin an all-too-familiar tale of government foisting unwanted services on an indifferent public, his is a mendacious misstatement of the facts.

But while Pesce is quick to assert nefarious motives to any criticism of state run or financed wireless broadband networks, it’s hard to know what he is actually arguing. He misleadingly uses an independent, not-for-profit home WiFi sharing initiative to try to demonstrate the success of the entirely separate Google-Earthlink network.

The former is a voluntary community effort, and the latter is a public private partnership bogged down in contractual disputes and political stunts.

Further, he asserts that ‘corporate giants’ of the telecommunication sector are the biggest obstacle to the San Francisco project’s success, which will come as a surprise the to Google (market cap: US$160 billion) and EarthLink (market cap: US$864 million) executives who have spent the last two years hurrying between community interest group meetings to listen to local politicians preen for their constituents.

And its hard to figure out what market failure the NSW government is trying to address here. Wireless internet access is already offered to consumers in Sydney. And Spin Internet is now even offering it for free in Sydney, if with quite a small download limit.

Rather, the NSW plan is yet another case of politicians ‘giving the gift of broadband’ to voters, with little reference to the efficacy of doing so. When advocates of municipal wifi fudge the difference between government action and voluntary action, they merely give politicians free licence to spend.

Update: No free market writer should be without a quote from a ’sacred text’ to suit the occasion, and when the rare Australian quote is available, we are under a virtual obligation to supply it:

…if a democracy has a taste for bread and circuses, and politicians are willing to satisfy that taste, of course any system will fail…

…activities undertaken as part of a political regime have a very definite bearing on its efficiency and soundness: they may overload it with complex problems; [and] they may introduce new problems, new political influences, new vested interests… - Eggleston, State Socialism in Victoria, 1932