Judging by the response of some governments, their biggest fear about the internet is its ability to bring about their downfall. Pick your poison. Over the past couple years, we've seen Tweeting revolutionaries, anti-war wikileaks and, of course, good old cyber warfare, usually in the form of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks from one country against another.

Last week Australia saw a reversal of that. Thanks to a proposal by the new Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, that promised to bring high-speed internet access to more areas of the country, the Labour party was able to grab the allegiance (at least temporarily) of the two additional MPs it needed to have a majority in parliament.

In Australia, the lack of internet access is seen as a problem that is hindering economic growth.

This isn't anywhere as near as exciting as Iranians Tweeting to protest last year's election, but that the country's demand for better access could actually determine the outcome of who control governments, shows just how powerful the technology has become. It's not quite up to the level of water, electricity and other utilities, but the old Interweb is finally being recognised not as a luxury, but as a necessity.

However, Australia really is fighting an uphill battle. Much like the UAE, Australia relies heavily on fibre-optic cables that run across the ocean's floors to connect us to the rest of the world. Both countries rely on nine cables (in the UAE, seven come ashore in Fujairah with two more landing in Dubai), but Australia has a population 44 times greater than us and 91 times more area to cover.

They will also get to discover the fact that having a good, solid internal internet infrastructure doesn't mean squat on the World Wide Web. First, they'll probably get to learn first-hand that an undersea earthquake or even a simple fishing boat trailing its anchor can knock out international access for a couple of weeks. The Middle East and India have faced that problem at least three times over the last two years.

The second problem they'll discover is that the good infrastructure is just as frustrating as a bad one, unless you're accessing web sites in your own country. While I have a decent connection here in the UAE (8MB), that speed drops like a sack of puppies the second I start connecting to websites overseas. During a recent speed test on Speedtest.net, my connection speed dropped to 2MB even between here and Kuwait. When connecting to servers in the Silicon Valley, my speed dropped to below 1MB.

Changes

So for the Gillard proposed plan to have a meaningful impact on the Australian economy, the country is going to have to make a few changes both technically and politically.

The technical part of the solution is easy, as least relative to the other. The government will just need to promote Internet start-ups or convince existing companies to move servers to the country.

Changing the rest will likely prove nasty.

For most of the last decade, Australia has actively explored the possibility of internet filtering, which significantly slowed internet speeds and was designed to prevent access to any site not blessed by the Communications and Media Authority. Under the country's current censorship plan, even sites that sell mature video games, such as Amazon.com, could be banned. With a history of extensive blacklisting, Australia isn't likely to develop a business environment attractive to web developers.

The irony here is that most of the web censorship demands come directly from Gillard's own Labour party. The real question will be how long a political alliance based on a promise of expanded internet infrastructure which seems to go against her own party's beliefs will last. It nice to think that the Internet can be a driving force in political and economic issues, but to do that successfully will require more than just having more ways to plug into the ‘net.