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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..."
Let alone two.
Task Mangler
Implementation of a system like that unavoidably involves substantial fixed costs(both at startup and per year). Once you have one, though, incremental costs should be pretty low. Thus, the obvious way of making it "more efficient" in dollars/URL terms is to use it a lot more.
Obviously, the mere existence of the system sucks, and taking pot-shots at governmental inefficiency is always fun; but there is a serious point here(although this program is a poor example, since it shouldn't exist at all):
Inefficiency is bad; but do not make the mistake of assuming that procedural restraint is a form of inefficiency. After all, courtrooms could be much more efficient, in case/year terms, if jury trials and defense attorneys were abolished. Prisons would be much more efficient, in dollars/year/inmate terms, if they were kept as full and as crowded as possible. And just think of the negative impact of the internal affairs division on the number of officers actively patrolling the streets, a terrible waste.
If your justice system allows efficiency to replace justice as the primary criterion, you have issues.(Of course, if your justice system allows public hysteria and political convenience to replace justice as the primary criteria, you get web censorship schemes).
At the age of 15 I could tell the Telstra Share Offers were vastly overpriced, this is why they only sent their prospectus to selected individuals in the first release. Telstra has held back the advance of internet and telecommunications services in this country and why should we help them hold it back even further for the sake of other peoples bad investment.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
To decrease the stupid cost per blocked url metric?
Seriously, the filter proposal is simply lipstick on a pig... The real problem for Australia is the lack of a clear regulatory system. As a gamer, the fact that we don't have an R18+ classification really irritates me, the internet classification system just depends on what the ACMA feels like on that day, as they don't have to get a site a classification, just declare what they believe the classification board would approve. It might help if we got a politician who understood technology, instead of the current streak of 'wonderful' caretakers
Good on govt. for doing what should have been done before telstra was sold. This actually ensures that there will be some competition, rather than a continual requirement for regulation. In its current form, telstra is a recipe for anti-competitive strategies. With a monopoly on copper, they have a retail arm and a wholesale arm, that sells to companies who compete with the retail arm.
Sol and his amigos didn't exactly help telstra either. In Australia the government is not afraid of regulating with the consumer in mind.
meh
The bigger concern is that they can introduce such things without any legislation passing and have it effectively stick over multiple years
My concern is that they tax individuals, the young, the old, the rich, the poor, on each drink. Then when they decide the tax is illegal guess who they refund.. the person that paid the tax? NO! They refund the alcohol industry.
Makes me think the alcohol industry might be strong arming the government into making up the tax so they can sell these drinks at a higher price which everyone grumbles about and accepts and then profits from!
Which goes to prove Australia is anything but "just". The concept of a "fair go" is nowhere to be found. If Australia stood behind the "fair go" they would hunt down every individual that bought an alcopop and refund them that $1 or so.
Or better yet they'd just not collect un-ratified taxes while threatening businesses with fines and retrospective taxes if/when legislation actually gets passed.
What the hell are you talking about. If you have never heard anyone in gov talk about splitting up telstra before, you have been living under a rock. This is the best thing that could have happened, and should have happened from the beginning.
The truth is instead that if Telstra didn't have a government mandated monopoly then Sol or Ziggy would have completely destroyed it due to their mismanagement. The price of a government mandated monopoly and having a government as the largest shareholder (future fund) is that the government can take that away.
Telstra have not been "playing ball" since about 1996! I also don't see how you can blame the Prime Minister for the money grubbing scam of the previous government of the Telstra float. A company that spends millions buying a dodgy pirate ringtone company in China and a thousand other bits of stupidity should not be immune to government action when it is in the national interest and the government is the major shareholder. The government has to get more out of it than a place to put good mates on the board, which is nearly all the previous government did. It needs better management than letting a failed farmer pick a silver tongued mexican bandit as a CEO then get that seconded by a historian too radical to get a good job in academia and a corrupt businessman that bought his way onto Australias TV screens as a pathetic copy of Letterman.
Kevin Rudd's huge ego really has nothing to do with it. We are all paying life support for a disfunctional corporation that could not exist in a competitive environment. We effectively have a government Qango that the government can not control and expending far more money while delivering far lass than it would if it was run by the government or was run like a private corporation. Sol must have been laughing all the way to the bank as he came over, called his friends over to join the feeding frenzy and contracted out many failed projects at vast expense with nothing delivered to friends at Andersons/Accenture and others.
Off topic but the irony and the laugh would be on you if they "harassed" you the same the British did: by harassment do you mean they forced you out of your homes, to learn their imported language, killed your friends and kidnaped your kids ?
I didn't realise it had to be on the same scale as the-most-corrupt to qualify as corruption ? Nepotism and chronyism are corruption of the highest order when done at a government level, the people get less than they deserve through personal greed. Retroactive laws which benefit the government as an institution over the people they are sworn to defend and uphold is corruption.
And vote for who exactly in this two horses of slightly different colour race ? Tory ? Lib Dem ? Green ? Pirate ? Honestly, you believe a change of management to something incredibly similar will change things ?
I'm sorry, I've lived through this sceptred isle being 'managed' by both major parties. I'll consider, research and vote as always, but I expect only a different colour tie on the man at the top.
Agreed. The problem I had with the pseudo-privatisation of Telstra was that the infrastructure had been paid for by our taxes, but was being sold off with the company, giving Telstra a huge advantage in the marketplace. To me, the organisation should have been split into three independent units - (1) Mobile phone/data, (2) landline, internet and other services and (3) infrastructure. The last would become a govt authority which would take a cut from all the phone companies for using the infrastructure and in return build more/improved infrastructure by tendering out jobs. That way the infrastructure costs would not have been borne by the telcos, allowing them to come into the market cheaply and improve competition. The other parts of Telstra could then have been sold off to operate as private companies with no market advantage apart from their incumbency. This would have allowed them to operate in the marketplace without having the govt as a major shareholder and being forced to guarantee services including unprofitable ones.
But it's too late now.
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.