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Transparency Required For $37 Billion Aussie Broadband Deal

Posted by timothy on from the if-not-free-markets-at-least-a-bit-of-sunshine dept.

destinyland writes "Freedom of Information Laws have been successfully extended to Australia's $37.5 billion broadband internet project — a 100 mbps fiber network covering 94% of the Australian population. The massive National Broadband Network had originally been classified as exempt from Australia's Freedom of Information laws, which Australia's goverment argued would impose 'a competitive disadvantage' on its operating company. The Opposition and Green parties pointed out that freedom of information was essential, since the NBN Company would be operating as an internet monopoly."

3 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Useless posturing by the conservatives. by sg_oneill · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Bah. The opposition have been running a ridiculous scare campaign to try and convince people that its a terrible idea and instead the government should be rolling out 4G wireless as the new "next generation" broadband.

    Never mind that 4G is slower than the current ADSL2+ network.

    And the bit about a monopoly is ridiculous. The current copper network is owned as a monopoly by Telstra who are proving to be deeply anti-competitive compared to when it was government owned . If your going to do a monopoly, let the govt run it so that it wont have an anti-competitive profit motive. Then let the commercials offer alternatives. This is the current plan.

    The conservatives would block their own assholes if they believed labor had invented them.

    --
    Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
    1. Re:Useless posturing by the conservatives. by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What the government fails to realise is that this only becomes a monopoly when privatised. Most government run utilities are in essence a monopoly and as long as the liberal government doesn't in the future turn around and privatise the national broadband network it won't be a monopoly but a utility.

  2. Opposition and Green parties scare mongers ! by johnjones · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Seriously

    they are trying to derail the NBN and trust me this is the ONLY way australia is not going to be a backwater in 5 year (more than it is now)

    they are nuts first they claim that wireless is speedier than fibre
    (what do they think forms the uplinks from the base stations....)

    then they claim its not value for money
    (frankly the amount of bandwidth in australia is worth 100 billion but they wont see that as they dont depend on the internet for anything since right now it's so slow)

    if you want to know what a society can do with lots of bandwidth go to sweden

    australia needs something like NBN FAST and the politicians should stop playing games !!!!

    regards

    John Jones