The Coalition thinks wireless is the answer for Australian broadband. In Inside Story, Jock Given remembers an earlier moment when wires-without-wires had their day.

THE PEOPLE at Google didn’t leap at Ken Auletta’s plan to write a book about their company. The New Yorker’s communications writer since 1992, Auletta portrayed the decline of the big three American television networks in Three Blind Mice, published in the early 1990s, and the fate of Microsoft in World War 3.0 a decade...

The prime minister was angry. So what did he say? asks Jock Given in Inside Story DAVID MARR would not have been Kevin Rudd’s first choice for a biographer when he turned up early in 2010 with a Quarterly Essay to write.

I’M RENOVATING. So many decisions. When it’s furniture, it’s less permanent. Get it wrong, you can shift it somewhere else, give it away, leave it on the street. Renovation is for keeps. The future. Decisions that can’t be turned back, choices requiring assessments about where everything is headed. Power – solar heating, solar everything, or...

What does $25 million worth of consultancy conclude about the national broadband network, asks Jock Given.