A good, but wrong statement by Monica Green

Monica Green in an article of IDG is unfortunately complaining on issues that she is partly responsible for herself. She asks why the new government is not doing more for IT (which is a valid question), but the problem is that the old government that she was part of did not do anything either. Or rather, they did two things: started a subsidarisation of broadband buildout in 1999, and they wrote an IT bill (more like what is called a white paper in other countries).

But they did not do anything.

The money they handed out could as well have been given randomly to people. That would have given a better effect than what now happened. Today, we see it was almost randomly. Which have lead to good solutions in many cities. Specifically now when many cities are working hard trying to clean up what the government money was used for.

We are a few years behind due to that decision and the lack of things happening. The IT Bill was correct, but it (as it always is in Sweden) talk about problems instead of doing something. I wrote about that earlier. And btw, the proposals that Monica was responsible for are valid until Dec 31 2007, so the new government has not been able to do anything because they are tied to the old (bad) decisions still.

That said, the question is valid, as the new government have to start talking about what to do now if they want to be ready Jan 1 2008. One good thing that is happening is a hearing on coloring of broadband products. I wrote about that as well here in this blog. You will hear more about that here. Other things that have happened is that the new government (at last, the previous did never do anything) asked PTS to look at possibilities to split Telia in two parts. Etc. So I think a lot is happening, but, one can always ask for more. Because of that, I think the questions from Monica are valid, but, she should be careful when answering questions about why she dare to ask them as her government did even fewer things.