AU Goverment To Break Up Telstra; Filtering News

benz001 writes "The Minister who has pushed the ridiculous broadband filter plan has at least won a few brownie points with yesterday's press conference, in which he promised to force Telstra to split its network and wholesale businesses. Australia's largest ISP, and the country's main infrastructure owner, will be given a chance to implement the structural separation voluntarily; if it does not, the Government will step in with legislation. Here is the Minister's official press release." And speaking of the filtering program, reader smash writes "After several years of debate and electioneering, some statistics on the Australian national web filtering effort have been disclosed. Apparently, the typical Aussie web surfer is 70 times more likely to win the national lotto than stumble across a blocked page. Additionally, despite the claim that the main aim of the filter is to block child pornography, only 313 of the 977 total sites blocked is on the basis of child porn. At $40M AU so far in taxpayers funds, the cost so far is around $40,900 per blocked URL. Government efficiency at work..."

Comments

Re:It's hard enough dealing with ONE Telstra

[Zeussy]

From the article it sounds like they are implementing something like what the British government did with BT, that the 2 firms cannot give each other preferential treatment, or special rates. To encourage competetion.

I disagree

[Namarrgon]

The separation of Telstra's wholesale and retail divisions has been discussed heatedly for many years, long before the change of government. The previous administration was happy to let it stand, which made Telstra investors happy but pissed off Telstra customers as well as competitors, not to mention holding back innovation. You only have to look at the number of times Telstra has lost in fights with the ACCC, the courts and even the government to see why this was a mistake.

The only group of people who are opposed to Telstra being split are the (unlucky) shareholders. Pretty much everyone else who has had to deal with Telstra are unhappy with their service and pricing, their treatment of retail customers and wholesale customers.

I'm not saying that the government's NBN plan is well-thought-out or anything, but Telstra's joke of a proposal and their juvenile "change the law to suit us or we take our toys and leave" attitude is even worse for the competitive landscape and the general Australian public. A split can't come soon enough.