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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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: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.

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.

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: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: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: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.

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.