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Major Australian ISP Pulls OpenOffice
thefickler writes "Australia's largest Internet service provider Telstra BigPond has removed OpenOffice from its unmetered file download area following the launch of its own, free, hosted, office application, BigPond Office. The removal of OpenOffice was brought to TECH.BLORGE's attention by a reader, who complained to Telstra BigPond's support department about no longer being able to download OpenOffice updates. The support people were quite open about why OpenOffice was no longer available, i.e. because it was perceived to be competitive with BigPond Office."
All the big ISP's seem to be convinced they can keep people in their own little ecosystem. God knows why. Like, what if one of their users tries to send a file generated by their supercool Bigpond Office software to someone, I dunno, who doesn't use BigPond? And it doesn't work? How useful is that?
expandfairuse.org
Are their users restricted to only get what is offered by their ISP? If not, why not just go somewhere else to download?
Its their storage/local bandwidth that is at stake here, why should they support competing products since one is their own? Or am i missing something key here?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
They are an ISP, if they blocked their customers from reaching http://www.openoffice.org/ that would be news.
Company doesn't want to supply free bandwidth to a competitor, so they pull that competitor's download. Consumers can still download the competitor's product for free elsewhere on the internet. I just can't bring myself to be outraged about this.
...unless you count "acting as any company with some sense of business-strategy would have done" as news.
Pure awesomenes
They're an Internet Service Provider (ISP). They're not supposed to decide what you can or cannot download. They're only supposed to provide the means to connect to the Internet and to let you do what you will on the Internet.
This will be news when Google search no longer returns OO results. Kinda dumb, since online apps are not going to replace offlne ones anytime soon IMHO. Surely much better to encourage their use, (if you're trying to sell such concepts/services) by 1. making better bridges between online & offline docs. 2. building trust by not acting stupidly.
I'm really going to trust my data with asshats like this?
Yes, and in return you pay them for the privilege. BigPond customers can do just that: they can download OpenOffice.org from openoffice.org, and the bandwidth they use will come out of the bandwidth allowance they've paid for. This is perfectly reasonable.
All that's happened is that BigPond have stopped offering a special download that didn't come out of the bandwidth allowance. They aren't stopping people downloading OOo who want to download OOo, they just aren't giving people who want OOo special treatment any more. They are being more net neutral, not less. What exactly is wrong with this?
Actually, not true, because now they're giving special treatment to users of their own service.
Slightly less net neutral than before.
Bandwidth caps in Australia are on every ADSL plan. This is usually because the bandwidth costs to the ISP are quite heavy compared to the USA. Most content comes from the US (google, youtube, yahoo etc) and so Telstra (owner of Bigpond) gets to set monopoly prices. To make the bandwidth cap a little more palatable, many (most) ISP's mirror content or large files on servers on their networks so there is no impact on their running costs. In a competitive move, Telstra/Bigpond have done the same thing.
Why Telstra thinks that removing OO from their unmetered server is going to gain them any kudos is a mystery. However, if you put on your monopoly management hat, you can see why. In this case I'd say it's purely evil (tm) as the competitive advantage of not having OO downloadable is next to nothing.
Seriously. They seem to be the MOST "anti-consumer-rights" of the so-called "Western" countries. It's just bizarre. Is Australia really a police state? Because that's what it seems like, honestly.
They've been complete pricks about the whole thing (selling bandwidth to individuals at a cheaper rate than claim that they are able to sell it to ISPs, creating crazy caps on bandwidth with massive fees for going over, deliberately holding back the rollout of ADSL 2+, etc).
They are widely despised by the Australian internet community. Oh for the days when natural monopolies were retained by the state and rented to companies/individuals at fair rates... (I know, I must be a socialist or something, right?)
It's not his font, it's whatever font is set in your browser for fixed width content. In other words, it's your font which is too small. Change your browser settings and the font will get bigger (I know because I did so).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It always amazes me that people sign up with these pricks.
They are huge, but they are a classic monopoly behaving badly. They own most of the last mile in Australia, and play games with it to their benefit and users and competitors cost. We cannot get naked DSL here for one, we must buy a phone service to put the DSL on.
Gatekeeper behavior at it's best. They've had the ear of government, and they've staked out their turf. You need lots of cash to challenge them.
Friends don't let Friends do BigPong.
Well, we're not all with Telstra. Most ISPs have their own content mirrors which are unmetered traffic for their customers. While all the ISPs do have to pay Telstra for bandwidth out to the exchanges at typical monopolistic rates, for end-users at other ISPs OOo will continue to be a free download from their ISP's mirror. And Telstra's customers are probably too stupid to know any better anyway (I say probably because there are some cases where using BigPond (Telstra's retail arm) makes sense, but they're few and far between).
But pretty much all you said is right. The liberal government really fucked up in selling Telstra off the way they did.
How long until they stop "subsidizing" the access of competing office suites? How long until you can't access docs.google.com, because it's a competing online office product or google.com/ig, because it competes with the provider's own "portal" home page? Or looking at the pages of competing service providers, so you can't switch to them?
Granted, all they were doing here is cutting off free access to a download that was singled out previously... but the logic that "because they're competing with our stuff" is easily and validly extrapolated to all sorts of possibilities.
I have never had an instance in my life, or those I've known, where a gun has or would have protected them. The closest story is an attempted break-in where shouting to the person that they had a gun and were calling the cops caused the person to forget about it and flee... (in that case they didn't even have a gun)
I think most instances where having a gun would actually help someone, they are caught off guard and surprised and don't have it at hand anyway.
Just my 2 cents, your mileage may vary.
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