Launched in December 2006, The Local Broadband Imperative has successfully focused attention on the importance of going beyond the idea of a single government-dictated nationwide high-speed broadband infrastructure.

Written by leading Australian economist Professor Joshua Gans of the Melbourne Business School, The Local Broadband Imperative was published to strong media attention. The Australian's influential telecommunications writer Michael Sainsbury covered the report two days running and concluded in an opinion piece that it is "a nice left-field and thoughtful contribution to the broadband debate". Terry McCrann in the Herald-Sun wrote that “Melbourne Business School's Joshua Gans and independent think tank CEDA have joined to very effectively skewer Telstra's claim to build and control a national broadband network”.

Through 2007, with Federal Opposition and Federal Government policies on broadband being formed and released, the CEDA paper's arguments have become even better known.

CEDA CEO David Byers explained The Local Broadband Imperative on the ABC’s World Today program on 11 May 2007:

ELEANOR HALL: Now what about communications infrastructure? The [World Competitiveness Yearbook] report finds that Australia’s way down the table in terms of internet costs as you mentioned, and on the ability of the nation’s communications technology to meet business needs. Given that, is the Labor Party on the right track with its promise to fund a national high-speed broadband network?

DAVID BYERS: I don’t really want to be drawn specifically on individual party policies because, as I said, we really review these things over the long term. But ... there was an interesting piece of research which was conducted by Professor Joshua Gans, who did this as CEDA research paper last year. What he found was that the best way to try to put in place the right broadband solution was to have a series of different local level solutions.

For example, you might have very fast fibre-based local networks in one place. You might have competing cable and wireless networks in another, and basic ADSL [asymmetric digital subscriber line] in a third place. So, rather than having a one-size-fits-all solution, you would really look at something which is more reflective of local circumstances and local conditions.

In a detailed feature for the Australian Financial Review on 6 June, John Davidson wrote:

An economist at Melbourne Business School, Joshua Gans, argues that in any case there may not be enough public benefit from a national high-speed broadband network to justify a large investment of public money.

Many of the benefits of high-speed broadband, such as watching movies and TV shows streaming off the internet in real time, or ready access to pirated movies, TV shows, music and pornography, are private benefits that ordinarily wouldn’t warrant government assistance, he says.

Besides, says Gans, many areas of Australia alreay have world-class internet access — how could Star Wars have been made in Sydney if the internet link with George Lucas’s studio in the US wasn’t a fast one? — and those regions that don’t already have access to fast internet don’t always have an urgent need for it.

"My suspicion is that there will be areas where the government needs to invest to get to the highest-speed broadband, if that’s the goal, but it doesn’t have to be everywhere immediately in one big bang," Gans says.

"And if people can’t wait, then they have to move to areas where it’s already available," Gans says.

The Federal Government sees the report as sympathetic to its position. Professor Gans, however, believes both parties need a changed approach to telecommunications issues. As he wrote in a feature article for The Age on 21 June 2007:

In a report for the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, I argued that what we might like to do is let local solutions flourish, with different localities pushing their own plans that may include competition or even some local council provision ... The Australian broadband scene is filled with promises but no solutions. Competition issues that have held back investment for years have not gone away. Neither party has proposed a way of dealing with them.