Over in the UK the Government has issued what it's calling the Digital Britain Report. There has been a lot of reaction. Essentially the idea is that everyone should have broadband in their house by 2012 (just in time for us to underfund the Olympics) and, er...and they all live Happily Ever After.

There has been a lot of reaction (see the BBC's round-up for details and a PDF of the report itself). It's short on detail, there's no real strategy, the criticisms run.

My concern is elsewhere. Everybody is taking it for granted over here and elsewhere in the world that broadband coverage will increase, that it will get faster and it will be like running water eventually. There has been no thought given, as far as I can ascertain, to the cost and where the money for the infrastructure is going to come from. It won't have escaped anyone's attention that we're really not too well off at the moment in this place (by which I mean 'Planet Earth') - and yet nobody has noticed that taking improvements in a particular area for granted is glib in the extreme.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope the recession won't be as bad as, say, President Obama thinks (he says it's a disaster, but what does he know, in the job for a week and already he thinks he's an expert). But making sure we can all download movies a bit faster isn't going to be a priority in anybody's money.