This short paper presents some ideas about the difficulties which have arised in ‘selling’ the National Broadband Network in Australia in recent years. These difficulties, I argue, are part of the interplay between the need to ‘sell the future’ (a common aspect of new technology developments) in the context of an exisiting, well-established understanding that links the Internet and the NBN. while we have been consistently told tha the NBN is more than just high-speed broadband (and it is), we also need to be aware that how we understand this technological development is always going to be shaped by the Internet as experienced in society.
A more extensive version of this short paper is under development.
