Rupert Murdoch Wants To Destroy Australia's National Broadband Network

pcritter writes "With the Australian Federal Election looming, Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Australia's biggest newspapers, is looking to unseat the incumbent Labor government over its centerpiece National Broadband Network policy. The media mogul sees the NBN as a threat to his media empire and has ordered newspapers to attack the project at every opportunity. The NBN seeks to bring 100Mbps Fibre-To-The-Premises internet to 93% of the country with wireless and satellite for the remainder. It currently reaches 4% of the population and is slated to complete in 2021. The conservative opposition has promised to dramatically scale back the project."

Comments

Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[bartron]

Honestly, I'm sick of technological advances being blocked because it hurts someones bottom line. Something something stock whip makers.

If the NBN affects his business then his business is archaic and newscorp can adjust or die...preferably the latter

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[Nichotin]

It is both funny and tragic how these people, who can build such large conglomerates, fail to see the business opportunities that arise when 93% of the population has 100Mbit fiber...

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[bartron]

I don't trust the government as far as I could spit but the advantages afforded by 100mbit fibre to the home is worth picking the lesser of two evils (or incompetents as the case may be. BTW, my election preferences go way beyond fast internet, although it is a consideration)

Also, even though a government may be inefficient it takes a government with no expectation (or requirement) to make a profit to implement a scheme such as this. A private company needs to make money to survive and can't bear the debt an initial rollout requires to implement (case in point, the fibre rollout in the ACT by TransACT). Once the infrastructure is in place then it, or portions thereof, can be privatised if needed.

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[polar red]

at's a good idea are fools that thing government is always good

also fools : people who think the government is always wrong, or after them. you generalise too much.

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[Carewolf]

Well, he probably sees the opportunities, but also realize he is not the best person to take advantage of them, so he must destroy it to avoid his betters from getting an advantage there, since they might use that to bring light to the places his media empire currently rules.

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[erroneus]

Government does, on the other hand, understand infrastructure needs. Matters such as minimum standards, right of way and others help to prevent cherry-picking businesses from servicing and improving only the most profitable areas which leads to all manner of growth and development problems not the least of which are population densities in small and concentrated areas (which leads to high real estate/housing, high violent crime and many other problems) and extremely underdeveloped areas where the population cannot participate in modern life.

At first basic needs included roads, then sewage, then public water (not so sure that's as much of a great thing these days), then electricity, then telephone. We all agree these things are not just good, but necessary for a civilized area to exist today. And the internet? I think we've gone far beyond it being considered a novelty and no one uses FAX machines any more... (okay, almost no one) As far as I'm concerned, it's as much of an infrastructure/utility need as the rest and internet needs to replace the telephone and it cannot do that without first having efficient and usable broadband. Also, we need some open standards for internet telephony that doesn't mean paying someone or something like Skype or other commercial entities.

Anyway... I have too much to say on the subject, but while I agree we can expect waste and mismanagement from government, you have to understand it goes back to the motives of government. Ideally, government should not be for profit. (Invariably it is because business people help get government into office which supports their business interests... a whole other discussion)

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[drinkypoo]

I was watching a Werner Herzog documentary about trappers in the Siberian taiga and, long story short, one trapper was complaining about trappers who will trap before some kind of critter's coat was really ready, on the basis that a few coins in his pocket now is better than someone else getting full price for the pelt later if they trap it instead of him. It's universal, and it's the reason why I'm a liberal and not an anarchist; without adequate restrictions on commerce it rapidly becomes first and foremost an instrument of tyranny. Kind of like now.

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[Ocker3]

Exactly, things like water, power, roads, internet access, these are infrastructure that is necessary for commerce, you'd think any politician who wants business to flourish would Want a Labor-style NBN as it increases the chances for Australians to do business tasks better than other countries!

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[BrokenHalo]

Well, he probably sees the opportunities, but also realize he is not the best person to take advantage of them...

I don't think so. Murdoch might be an asswipe (except with the reservation that such an item is actually useful), but from his point of view, the NBN is a threat to his Poxtel network. There's no way he can abandon that, so he'll just swing his wrecking ball wherever it'll work. But let's face it, he's 80-something years old, and he has been solidly on the most extreme right-wing side of the fence for decades, so really there's nothing new to see here.

He has unlimited access to advertising space, which will probably work in his favour with the so-called "swinging" voters - i.e. those who are so brain-dead, they should be disqualified from voting at all.

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[asaul]

Some history. Until around 1991 Australian telecommunications was provided by a single government owned business - Telecom (formerly Post Master General, then later Telstra). Telstra practically owned all the in ground infrastructure including the last mile copper to practically every phone in the country. Any hint of competition was crushed with obstruction, anti-competitive wholesale practices etc. Other players came in and grew some of their own infrastructure, extra long haul fibre mostly, but still practically any Telco wanting to provide services to a customer had to lease a Telstra tail line, generally at prices that made it impossible to offer anything cheaper than Telstra offered. During this period technology that the US long forget (such as ISDN) was as premium as you could get here, and technology like DSL was limited by being only possible where Telstra decided to offer it or where Telstra were forced to provide space in exchanges.

The old copper network crippled any sort of improvement to Australian internet technology - the copper lines were Telstra's cash cow and doing anything modern with them would also mean they would have to share it with the competition, so nothing much changed.

Then a previous conservative government came up with the idea of doing a "National Broadband Network" initiative. It was basically WiMax everywhere, except new places that might get some fibre over time - most likely FTTN (fibre to the node). The problem was to do anything more required buying the copper back from Telstra, and the conservatives screwed the pooch on that because they sold off Telstra as one entity - retail, wholesale and the copper network. As a new deregulated entity with some more gung ho leadership, Telstra were even more anti-competitive and not willing to give up their network. The conservatives also naively believe the free market will bring in the new technology, despite 20 years of proof that Telstra won't let that happen.

When the government they got voted out, the new more socialist government (read that as centre left) plan for the NBN was researched, and the proposal was Fibre to the Premises (FTTP). To do this they gave Telstra the option of selling its copper/access for $11B, or having it bought by compulsory acquisition (a constitutional right of the government) and a long legal fight. A deal was reached (most likely because Telstra delayed long enough and now had a new 4G network that was now its prime market) and the copper was sold, allowing the NBN project to kick off and start rolling out fibre across the country. The basic plan is the NBN Company (NBNCo) build a national fibre network and run it, and service providers sell services on it to customers.

As is natural of opposition government, they say no to everything, and think their way is better. The argument boils down to this:

a). Spend $36B and provide 96% of the population with 100M or 1GB internet over fibre. Most of that cost is covered by selling investment bonds and the eventual income from providing services on this network, so the cost is not necessarily on the taxpayer as much as the opposition would like to go on. Obvious benefit, its long term scalable infrastructure, but is more costly and slower to deploy. This is the socialist (Labour Party) plan.
b) Spend $28B and provide most of the population with 24MB VDSL using FTTN, leaving the copper as the last mile to the premises. Similar business plan, just slightly less cost. Benefit is it is slightly cheaper, and meets current internet needs. This is the conservative (Liberal Party) plan.

So - Murdoch is quite definitely a friend of the Liberals (ironic naming for conservatives), and is using his weight in the media to lay into the NBN plan every chance he gets to attack Labour. Any minor delay, problem, cost increase or simply propaganda he can find to rubbish the Labour government using the NBN is headlines. Also because if the Liberals get their way they will basically stop rolling out the current NBN and go to the lower specification one, just on the basis of slightly cheaper cost at the expense of building actual real infrastructure for the country - and that would be ideal for Murdoch too.

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[SuricouRaven]

There's almost more general competition. He controls a media empire: Television production, broadcast networks, newspapers. Maintaining an empire like that depends to some extent on barrier to entry and economy of scale considerations - no new startup channel is going to appear to compete with his own because they would be unable to afford to set up studios or license content, and even if they could they don't own huge cable networks or geostationary broadcast satellites, and even renting some capacity on his own networks costs a lot of money - there's a reason all those religious channels, shopping channels and very niche-interests live up in the 900s on the episode guide.

The internet changes that. Anyone with a little skill and some very affordable equipment can set up like That Guy With The Glasses or SF Debris did - all the time people spend watching videos off of such websites is time they might otherwise be spending watching television.

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[fustakrakich]

The success of anarchy depends on self discipline and voluntary cooperation. It is possible that such a thing is unattainable in this physical universe, but it would be nice to make the effort. It would mean we are becoming human. What you described is not anarchy.

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[geoskd]

If you're not making money, you're losing money. But only a government can simply tax you for more or worse borrow it and let your kids pay it back.

Put the government in charge of the Sahara desert and in five years it will run out of sand. Any organization tends toward inefficiency. A free and open competitive market tends to put pressure on participants to be efficient.

Governments have no idea how to run a tech (or any) business except to make it late, over budget and under spec. Every decision is made for political rather than economic reasons. The only people who think that's a good idea are fools that thing government is always good, or wolves that want the power.

Which are you?

Inefficient organizations are not the worst things that can happen to society. Far from it in fact. Tyranny and monopoly abuse are by far the greater evils. In the so called land of the free, we have millions of workers being squeezed for every penny in the name of efficiency, so that the tyrants on top can have more and more. Meanwhile, they use their powers to control access to resources that should cost almost nothing so that those in the middle and on the bottom can have less and less even though the availability of resources continues to grow.

The simple fact is that efficiency of markets under capitalism only benefits the already wealthy. It does practically nothing for the middle class, and actively hurts the poor. The phrase a "rising tide lifts all ships" is not true with our broken economic system. What we need is a new economic system that severely limits how far ahead of the curve any individual can get. We used to have such a system, it was called progressive taxation. What we have now is a shambles.

The solution is relatively simple. Wipe out corporations the way they stand now. The socialists got the problem right, just botched the solution. You cant take the power away from one group of greedy scuzzballs, and give it to another group of greedy scuzzballs and expect everything to get better. A better suggestion I have heard is to give ownership of all corporations to the workers who are employed by the company. Each employee gets 1 vote in selecting those that run the company. Limit companies to a maximum number of employees to keep super-conglomerates from swamping individuals with raw numbers. To be sure, some economies of scale would be lost. The wealthy would never permit it if they have any say in the matter. Our current system of government will not allow it to happen because the wealthy have too much power and there is no way to get it back from them.

Our government has been completely and wholly pwned by the wealthy. Unless they are willing to give up the power permanently and in ways that can be enforced, the peoples of the democratic nations of the world may have no alternative than to replace capitalism at the point of a gun.

That is the reason that gun control is so dangerous to the average person. Once you have no ability to do violence, you have very little power to enforce your authority, and authority that cant be enforced isn't real. Remember that the next time you vote to "make our streets safer". Its not us they're making the streets safer for...

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll never have a worthwhile society until the average human is significantly more intelligent and ethical. Everyone is just too dumb and destructive on average to hope for much better right now.

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[WOOFYGOOFY]

Accurate and widely available information about reality is a mortal threat to your business model.

  What does that say about what you do for a living?

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[Bert64]

There are open standards for telephony, SIP for instance... You can call someone over SIP like an email address, e.g. user@sip.domain.com etc...
The problem is there is no profit in open SIP federation, it's far more profitable to keep users locked in to your own proprietary service (and new ones seem to keep cropping up all the time).

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[Howitzer86]

Translation: We have to control commerce before the other guy does.

But I suppose that's what politics boils down to... each group jockeying for control over a market. You've got the early trappers who will lobby against rules on trapping so they can get an early pelt, and you've got the late trappers who will lobby for rules against early trapping so they can get a mature pelt.

I think simply being able and willing as a government to make such rules is the problem. People learn expect that rules can be made in favor of their particular group, and that's all they lobby for - like Rupert Murdoch.

I'd personally much rather see a natural fairness - early pelt trappers and a national broadband - than a contrived fairness: laws against them to "make things more fair".

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[cffrost]

I was watching a Werner Herzog documentary about trappers in the Siberian taiga and, long story short, one trapper was complaining about trappers who will trap before some kind of critter's coat was really ready, on the basis that a few coins in his pocket now is better than someone else getting full price for the pelt later if they trap it instead of him.

Indeed, tragedy of the meta-trap.

It's universal, and it's the reason why I'm a liberal and not an anarchist; without adequate restrictions on commerce it rapidly becomes first and foremost an instrument of tyranny.

I'm with you.

Conceivably, a local game warden could enable the community to maximize their overall pelt yield — though, in this particular environment, I imagine that the pervasive threat of regulatory capture could make the position cost-prohibitive to fill.

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[dmbasso]

It would mean we are becoming human.

There is something that I'm still not fully convinced (and therefore I welcome comments) but I don't think the terms human and humane convey the right meaning. We humans are by nature pretty fucked up, but culture and reason keeps us away from our primeval instincts (to the point most of us don't even acknowledge they're still there). You can argue that culture and reason is part of the human condition, but even so it is not enough to curb a significant part of our population. And even if it is ugly, you should not deny it is part of being human.

In particular, I think we should change our culture in order to avoid the biases of:
1. group thinking
2. believing without evidence

When/if we get there, we'll still be humans, but we'll not behave as humans anymore.

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[dmbasso]

The hallmark of what it means to be human and not some other species is that we are not only capable of such things, but much better at doing it than any other. It is in our nature to improve ourselves through cultural and technological innovations. What you're thinking of is much more universal; merely 'animal' or 'mammalian'—perhaps 'great ape' at best. If anything deserves the title of 'human', it should be the struggle between the two.

Exactly my point.

Don't be so cynical as to deny the natural legitimacy of your own idealism.

Not at all, my point is that the common use of the term reflects only the ideal, when it should also encompass the bad aspects of being human.

And it is in itself an instance of group thinking. We are humans, therefore human must mean something positive only.

Re: Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[ebno-10db]

Political power in anarchist societies...

???

It's not a contradiction. Anarchists, or at least social anarchists, understand the need for some political organization. In fact anarchists don't believe in anarchy. It was a label slapped on them by those who didn't agree with their approach. After a while the anarchists got tired of fighting the label and just adopted it as their own. Unfortunately (and understandably) it's the source of much confusion.

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[XcepticZP]

And you think that people which are "too dumb and destructive" are going to be somehow "controlled" in another political system? What most people fail to consider, is that somehow these magical political systems are insulated from the people you speak of. On the contrary, those people become part of the political system and leverage the power we've given that system in order to indulge in their "dumb and destructive" behavior, often with the implied moral sanction of the rest of us.

If you don't believe me, just go ahead and ask yourself why most laws need to be "sold" and "marketed" to the public without any studies or peer-verifiable proof. And why none of those laws/policies are then examined after the fact to determine whether they achieved the goals they were put into place for, and subsequently repelled.

You can preach "checks and balances" all you want to me in response. But until such a time as all politicians are held accountable for their words, actions and laws they sanction, you are merely spouting pure unsubstantiated fantasy.

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[Maxo-Texas]

If one group can set the standard of working people to death, then why isn't that also fair?

"Your lucky to have a job"

"We have flex time, You can work any 80 hours a week you want"

and of course also...

"Full time is 30 hours a week here, so if you want to survive you better expect to work 60-90 hours a week at three different jobs. Heck- we've paired up with another business to employ you 30 hours a week if you work 30 hours a week here just to make it easy for you."

---

What is "fair" is ultimately up to the citizens. And sometimes, if you have strong enough control over the media and the police, they never wake up from propaganda.

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[MLRScaevola]

I've heard it said, and it seems more and more true as time goes on, that (paraphrasing): "Everything Marx said about Communism was wrong. Everything Marx said about Capitalism was right."

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[microbox]

but culture and reason keeps us away from our primeval instincts

It's important to realise that culture and reason are equally the product of primeval instincts. We like to flatter ourselves into thinking that emotion is somehow primitive; however, if you think about it, you are /always/ high on your feelings. We all are. For example, consider that you only know something is correct because of how you feel when you reach the conclusion. "Reason" is couched thoroughly in those primeval instincts. As an AI researcher and life-long student of the mind, that is my opinion.

How does this play out in the real world? Well, consider homosexuality and homophobia. Pro-gay groups like to say that homosexuality is "natural", and homophobia is a "cultural construction. Anti-gay groups like to say the opposite.

Both are wrong.

Human suffering happens because we are born with so many different competing instincts within us. The structure of the mind determines how we cognize and "reason" about these instincts. There is nothing in the universe that we can recognize outside of this stuff of thought. There is nothing "important" outside of what our instincts tell us.

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[kqs]

Not a contradiction. "Murder" doesn't mean "kill", it means "kill without the approval of most of society". War isn't murder. Capital punishment is only murder in some societies. Same with killing teenagers wearing hoodies and armed with candy, or killing women who show their faces in public, or killing those of the wrong skin color or religion or sexual preference.

Sucky and misleading, perhaps, but not a contradiction.

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[Macgrrl]

Which Government. His media empire spans multiple continents.

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[Macgrrl]

Given how little of this continent is settled and the distances between major population centres, high speed internet also provides opportunities for tele-medicine and education to be delivered to remote rural communities at a greatly reduced cost.

Re: Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[perceptual.cyclotron]

Sort of. Technically, 'anarchist' simply means 'without ruler' – not 'without order', 'without cooperation', or even necessarily 'without rules'. Etymologically, it is a political system only a hair's breadth from democracy (which simply means 'the people rule'). This fact is studiously ignored because it quite directly puts the lie to the idea that democracy has ever been attempted with any honesty.

Some relatively-parent poster hit on the core aspect, which is voluntarism, and is rightly now a +5 insightful. A ruler is someone who can force you to undertake certain behaviours, but the absence of a ruler doesn't restrict your ability to choose to follow someone, or to take their orders. Most apprentices are in this type of relationship with their mentors. They take instruction, and generally follow it, because they are confident in the topical authority of the mentor. If this confidence lapses, the apprentice finds a different mentor. If the apprentice successfully gains valuable experience, the relationship gradually shifts into a collaborative one based on equality and mutual respect.

Critically, the mentor's authority is always understood to be domain restricted. They are not a better or more worthy person – they are simply more knowledgeable and more experienced in a relevant area. Such individuals tend to accumulate followers quite naturally, and have no need to enforce their doctrines.

So, in practice, it might be better to reframe 'anarchists' as 'heterarchists' – highlighting transient, fluid, domain-restricted, and reciprocal hierarchies over entrenched asymmetrical trees with privilege, power, and authority accumulating at well-defined apical nodes.

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[Howitzer86]

I'm not saying it can't have good intentions. One reason I'm not a libertarian is the fact that I believe that there really is a class war going on. It's only big media and big people that say it's not real.

I also recognize that what's good for the goose is good for the gander. If you start lobbying in mass for rules intended to hurt an opposing group it can come back upon you at a time when your group is weaker. Taken to the extreme it's mass rule and mass theft. Still.... in certain instances I must admit it makes sense. We just gotta not have that constant adversarial mindset with regards to public policy.

Re:Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[Maxo-Texas]

A) I believe that there really is a class war going on.

B) We just gotta not have that constant adversarial mindset with regards to public policy.

Have to choose one or the other.
People have to hurt a lot more before they stop believing the propaganda they consume.
I've listened to an out of work man on the radio raging against unemployment when he self-admittedly was about to lose his house, his marriage, and everything he'd worked for.

I imagine if they brought of age discrimination, he'd have been against rolling back the supreme court rulings in 2007 that gutted citizens protections.

Libertarian is fine- but you need a strong government or it turns facist or oligarchical (because the powerful and wealthy walk over everyone else without a strong government to stop them).

Re: Rupert Murdoch can die in a hole already.

[drinkypoo]

It's the word 'power'. It implies coercion, which does not exist in anarchy.

That is an incredibly, astoundingly, jaw-droppingly stupid thing to say. Perhaps you meant to include some qualifiers. There's no state-sponsored coercion, but there's no state-sponsored protection from coercion, either.

Sheesh!

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought they did things "upside down" not "backwards" in Australia.

Re:Sheesh!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Australians can do both at once if you apply the [[-1, 0], [0, -1]] transformation matrix to them.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

The only correct response to this...

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Scream bloody Murdoch.

Australian federal election announced today

[bigmadwolf]

The timing of this post on the front page is a little too timely. The prime minister Kevin Rudd today announced the date the federal election is to be held. It will be September 7th. Me thinks the poster is quite possibly a card carrying Australian Labor Party (ALP) member.

There seems to be a lot of scaremongering going on in regards to the Liberal National coalition's NBN policy. The ALP is promising fibre to the building in all cases except for where it is completely infeasible (e.g. remote towns out in the desert etc.). Sounds great but it will be expensive. Probably somewhere well over $50 billion. The coalition is promising fibre to the node with fibre to the building available at cost to the user for those that need it. Coalition's will be a fair bit cheaper as it won't be funding fibre to every building.

The ALP's NBN policy page

The Liberal National coalition's NBN policy page

Debate over which of the two policies is superior is healthy but blatant biased scaremongering is not.

Re:Australian federal election announced today

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Keep following the money. Government doesn't do this out of the kindness of its heart regardless of the pleasing meme wrapper around it.

Other predictions: It will have greater overuse clogging issues (rationing creeping in) even as it costs more than private will. Don't mod me down. Just file it away and watch as history unfolds yet again. Maybe I'll be wrong. But history does not support that.

Re:Labor Lie

[The1stImmortal]

Seriously? The coalition's plan is "Let's take the Labor Party's plan, and shave a couple percent off the price by dropping the most important bit of the project!" (ie, converting from FTTH to FTTN and leaving everyone stuck with telstra's awful ancient copper system connecting to a large and unsightly roadside active cabinet)

If the NBN is going to get done, lets get it done properly, instead of doing some half-hearted poor job of it.

He will no doubt enlist the help of the country's

[mark_reh]

religious fanatics by pointing out that a high speed broad-band network will be primarily used to speed the delivery of pornography to children.

Re:Labor Lie

[ebno-10db]

What's a lie, that the Labour NBN policy is a good idea, or that Murdoch uses his media empire to oppose a policy that he thinks will hurt his business?

As an American, I don't know enough about the NBN program to say. If Labour sucks then let Australian voters throw them out.

Murdoch is another story. Excessive media consolidation is a major problem, and Murdoch's tentacles are not confined to your continent. The US used to have regulations that limited the extent of media consolidation, and ensured greater freedom and diversity of the press, but they were thrown in the trash. No one person or organization should control so much of the news that people get.

Of course he hates it.

[DMJC]

Of course Murdoch hates the NBN, he owns the largest Cable TV network in Australia! Who would be paying to watch shows over the cable network when they can download them over fibre? Or worse yet, pay money to netflix to stream them to their houses directly. It's a massive threat to FOXTEL.

That anti-government bullshit is not relevant

[dbIII]

The government's role here is basicly to put up the money and get the thing built. To use a vehicle analogy they are contracting out to get highways built but have no role in the trucking companies that are going to use it later.

The entire thing is being done to repair an earlier government mistake anyway - of giving a communications monopoly away with not strings attached so the best way for that monopoly to make money was just sit on it and patch bits that broke since 1996.

That's nothing

[mbone]

Here in the USA he is trying to destroy the entire country.

Re:He will no doubt enlist the help of the country

[mark_reh]

In the US we have at least 50% of TV and radio broadcast time and bandwidth dedicated to preaching (some of which is presented in the form of right-wing political propaganda), the remainder is divided between singing contests and "news" about the Kardashians.

That's only a Sydney solution

[dbIII]

One is a policy, another is a bit of a wish list before the policy is fully thought out. If you look hard enough there's bound to still be a podcast of the ABC radio interview with Malcolm Turnbull on the morning it was released, where the answer to nearly every question was along the lines of "we'll get to that later". If the Libs, Nats and LNP win and form a government I'd give it about a year before they have a plan. Whether it's better or worse depends on circumstances and how much pressure the Nats who want broadband in their electorates apply and what numbers they have. The preview we've seen is only going to work in areas with a lot of evenly spread telephone exchanges not far apart so is really only a Sydney solution.

The main purpose of the NBN as far as I see it is to do an end run around Telstra who is just happy to sit on infrastructure that hasn't changed much since 1996 and not let anyone else do anything better. Most of the vast cost of the NBN is about buying off Telstra. It's about fixing a mess that was dumped on the country in a desire for short term gain with a fire sale in times when the government didn't really need the cash. If Telstra had a board of better quality than a politician's wife, a failed historian and a union busting failed farmer things may have been different, but it's about sitting on stuff and not letting anyone else in instead of competing on the basis of improvements or service.

Re:"Attack the project" unsubstantiated

[cascadingstylesheet]

Oh c'mon, don't let boring reality get in your way! It's Murdoch! slashmind says must hate!

Re:"Attack the project" unsubstantiated

[Immerman]

Selectively telling the truth is one of the most time-tested effective ways to tell a lie - just spin a good narrative and leave out the parts of the truth that prove your position to be false.

So no, "having lots of facts" does not even come close to showing that something is not inaccurate and misleading. (Discalimer: I have no idea what the truth of the matter in this instance was, just stating a general trend)

Re:"Attack the project" unsubstantiated

[BrokenHalo]

Well, from what I just read, it shows the press council got three complaints in 2011, about three articles during June and July.

OK, well here's some much more recent and relevant food for thought:

Murdoch sends trusted general 'Col Pot' to bring down Rudd over NBN

Is that specific enough for you?

Re:Labor Lie

[drsmithy]

As an American, I don't know enough about the NBN program to say.
In a nutshell, the NBN is a plan to deliver fibre-optic telecommunications infrastructure to most of the country. It will build (and own) the physical infrastructure upon which retail ISPs will deliver their products.
If Labour sucks then let Australian voters throw them out.
Labor does, indeed, suck, and Australian voters are probably going to throw them out. The problem is if they do they're going to replace them with a party that takes everything that sucks about Labor, and says: "You boys are just playin'. Let's crank this shit up to 11!".

Re: Labor Lie

[drsmithy]

Australia. You mean the country/continent in the Southern Hemisphere, right? Because it really sounds like you're talking about America.
For nearly twenty years Australian political leaders have looked to America and thought "that's awesome, we need some of that over here".

Re:What is a 100Mbit connection good for?

[fustakrakich]

I know you're trolling (especially on the 'piracy' thing), but why does 100 megabit internet have to be of economic use?

Re:What is a 100Mbit connection good for?

[asaul]

Why have more than 8Mhz and 640k memory - all it does is drive people to use graphical based pr0n. Won't someone think of the ascii pr0n industry.

Think what a home with say two adults and two teenagers might consume in parallel - each possibly watching their own content - thats just video/streaming. Then you have other applications that benefit from low latency and low jitter connections that can be offered with such fast stable networks (better conferencing, gaming etc). The increased upload capacity can open up options for remote monitoring for medical or security purposes.

Sure, it will take time for the current use of such bandwidth to be consumed but you don't have the use for it until you build it. Go back 15 years and imagine those networks with modern YouTube and Netflix load on them.

Re:Labor Lie

[ebno-10db]

If you're trying to outdo us Yanks in corruption, forget it. Murdoch became a naturalized US citizen by an act of congress, rather than following the path that tens of millions of people who don't have lots of money to bribe congress have followed over the last few centuries. He became a citizen (in name only obviously) because there is/was a law that only a US citizen could own a US TV station.

current war

[Tom]

One part of many. Whether it's tobacco companies, the sugar industry, the media moguls - if you haven't realized that we live in the middle of a war between capitalism and humanity, you're living under a rock.

Corporations intentionally damage us, for profit. We are sold products known to damage our health because it's profitable. We have patent and copyright laws that are batshit crazy, because corporations think this will save their monopoly rents. In the US, corporations are fighting local governments who want to provide their citizen with services that the corporations fail to offer (like broadband in the hinterlands). All over Europe, we sold the public companies that our parents and in some cases grandparents had built up and paid for with tax money to private companies, and in most cases the results were rising prices and dropping quality. There are a number of movements to buy it back - that alone should tell you how successful the whole thing was for the public.

William Gibbson said in an interview that he stopped writing cyberpunk stories because if he had written what is reality today as fiction back then, people would've called him insane.

These are the final days of mankind. Not in an apocalyptic sense but in the sense of the end of our reign as the supreme creatures on this planet. Our overlords will be creatures we created, but it won't be robots or Skynet, it'll be virtual entities like corporations, governments and other faceless entities that you can't kill with a shotgun. The fringe-liberals are misguided, stockpiling food and ammo won't do you any good in this war, because it's not fought that way.

RM will shrivel up and die eventually....

[Bob_Who]

In the meantime, always oppose all things Murdoch.

I so look forward to that evil turd dropping dead so I can dance on his grave.

No level of hell is too deep for this pathetic sociopath.

He might be a mogul, but he will always suck ass like a loser.

Re: What is a 100Mbit connection good for?

[Grishnakh]

He is a shill.

There's only a few applications now that I can think of offhand: 1) backup (this is a pretty important one; it takes forever to back up a 1TB drive over the internet at current speeds; 100Mb/s or even 1Gb/s would greatly improve this, making whole-drive backups feasible over the internet to remote providers. 2) video-on-demand. Netflix is great, but the quality is a little low, and it always has problems on Friday and Saturday nights for me during peak hours. 3) Home servers would be nice too, since they're basically disallowed by most ISPs now.

Looking into the future, video-on-demand is going to need more bandwidth, especially as we demand higher quality/resolution. When we move to 4K video screens, we're going to need much more bandwidth to have video-on-demand to those services. Also, if you have multiple people in the same house wanting to watch VoD simultaneously (different programs on different devices), you'll need even more bandwidth to support that.

Finally, just as no one imagined all the applications personal computers and the internet would enable back in the 1970s, there's no way to imagine all the applications 100Mb/s networks will enable now.

Re:What is a 100Mbit connection good for?

[Rakhar]

He was restating the parent post, only from the view of years earlier. The point is that at one time, the connection speeds we have now would have been considered excessive in much the same manner. Somehow some of us still manage to use all of the bandwidth we can get without sharing movies and other media. Maybe not always, but sometimes. (How 'bout that summer Steam sale? My ISP must've hated that...)

Having better internet access available universally can at worst have no effect on some people that really don't use it that much. For the rest of us, it's a bonus. To even imply that it should be seen as a negative thing is ridiculous.

Re:What is a 100Mbit connection good for?

[mikael]

That's what happened in Australia. The state education system ran their own book printing service as part of the national course syllabus. Then the private sector said, "Hey, we can do that more cost-effectively and make a profit at the same time". So it was privatized and the prices shot up.

In the UK, the "independent" TV companies used to be required by law to provide education programming for schools (as in the TV Ark archive). But then after several mergers, they said, "It's really too expensive for us in a modern competitive broadcasting environment", so they were successful in getting absolved of that responsibility. And no-one really watches those channels anymore.

Re:What is a 100Mbit connection good for?

[sd4f]

The thing is the NBN isn't cheap. You will be paying at least $70 per month for 100mbit connection with only 30gb of download data. For a more generous download allowance, you are looking at $100 per month. I currently have 24mbit adsl (get about 1.8 megabytes per second top download speed) with 50gbyte download quota, that costs $30 per month, to get a comparable NBN plan in speed and quota, I'd have to pay $50 per month.

Re:What is a 100Mbit connection good for?

[quantumphaze]

You have to include the $30 line rental or compare the Naked ADSL prices in your comparison.

The whole point of NBN other than fast speeds, is that gets rid of the broadband lottery. So that 25/5Mbps plan gives you 25/5Mbps, not 1.8Mbps. The opposition's FTTN will not with download speeds varying depending on how far you live from the node.

Quite honestly most people who oppose the NBN oppose it because it's a Labor project and would just as readily oppose FTTN it if the parties' chosen technologies were reversed and Abbot/Turnbull were going to switch to FTTP.

Re:Labor Lie

[fido_dogstoyevsky]

As an American, I don't know enough about the NBN program to say. If Labour sucks then let Australian voters throw them out.

Labor hasn't done that bad of a job, there's just a lot of people who hated Julia Gillard for no rational reason ...

Seeing her on TV baying for Julian Assange's blood - actually a pretty good reason.

The real problem is that the Liberals are even worse. Tony Abbott is nothing but a frontman for the party powerbrokers, he is even more spineless and weasely than the average politician. The biggest thing he has going for him is the fact that people hated Julia Gillard. But he's lost this edge now that Kevin Rudd is back in charge.

Seriously though, I dont mindlessly hate the Liberals, just the current form of the Liberal party. Abbott talks about "faceless men" in Labor yet expects us to ignore the strings attached to Abbott. If the Liberals really wanted to win this election, they'd sack Abbott and put Malcolm Turnbull in charge, but the "faceless men" of the Liberal party wont do this because 1) Turnbull is too much of a centrist for their liking, 2) Turnbull will not blindly follow their agenda.

Sadly true.