Well if you start out from near-zero getting such increases is easy. Mac was small in Asia, very small. Their main market has always been home turf, Europe a good second.
I have no idea, but when I look around me on the train here in Hong Kong it seems like half the population has an iPhone. OK maybe I'm exaggerating a bit but when you see someone playing with a smartphone it's usually an iPhone. And there are lots of people owning a smartphone. Computers no idea - but at least Apple has a strong brand presence, so that should at least put the mac as option in their minds, and that again will drive sales. And of course when it comes to tablets the iPad rules.
Following the same line of argument you can say the exact same about the US and Japan. Also there many people can not afford or are not interested in buying a computer. This may be related to income, age (too young/old), or simply interests.
Of course the ratio of people that can afford a PC is far higher in US and Japan than in China or India. For now, that is. The latter two are catching up fast, if the effective market (people that can afford it) isn't already bigger in either country than in the US.
My Android phone allows the complete password to be visible when typing (which is convenient, and unless you're in a public space not really insecure to begin with), while by default it will only show the latest letter entered for a few seconds so you can see if it's the right one, hiding it after a few seconds, or when you enter the next character. So very similar to the iPhone.
I have never seen this as a serious security issue. I'd say it's not exactly worse than looking at someone typing on a physical keyboard.
Having that kind of shitty and apparently sky-high bills, well that'd be a reason for me to move to one of the other half dozen or so mobile phone providers. Or use one of the other 100s of IDD service providers. It's as easy as that. That's called a free market for you.
Microcredit sound nice in theory, but I've yet to find one I like.
The 'best' services tend to be those that let you access everything for a fixed price.
This.
You nailed it there, exactly my argument but approached from the opposite side. It will be a long long time before we have working and popular micropayments, if we ever will have it to begin with.
I haven't read the BBC article but have read this in the local Hong Kong paper today.
Lots of sites closed, but the opinions vary on why. The state-sponsored bodies in China claim it is because most of those sites went bankrupt, while others (mainly foreign human-rights activists) claim it's the government forcing them to close. Fact is lots of sites closed, yet the total number of pages available is a whopping 90 billion. Yes that's like 70 pages for every Chinese citizen. And many more if you only count Chinese Internet users.
Some web sites are for sure closed by the government, mainly for pornography, but also sometimes for political speech. Though it seems the Chinese actually enjoy quite some freedom on-line.
And Twitter not available from within China, who cares when you have Weibo? Most Chinese can't read English anyway. And no Google? Well they have Baidu.
Yes it's censored, but no they don't miss out on too much functionality either. It's not that the Chinese can not do those things by themselves, and they do it in Chinese catering to Chinese users. It may be an American viewpoint but all the time I hear "no YouTube, no Google, no Twitter" as if that's the complete Internet?! I'm happy there is more than those few sites. Much more.
And on the importance of Twitter in China... how many non-Chinese will ever look at what's going on on Weibo?
In my case, a $12.95 monthly charge just showed up on my phone bill (land line). There are so many odd items on the bill, it's hard to notice another one.
That amount is more than I pay for my two business fixed lines. Yes that's together. So that's a pretty big sum for a phone bill to appear.
Secondly, "so many odd charges"... you go through the bill once, and tick what you don't know what it is. And make a call to the phone company for explanation. That's what I do with my credit card bill. It's not that hard, it just requires you to care about your money. If you let such sums just stand, sorry to say, but you obviously don't care enough.
In that case you are making a local or 800-number call... you're not making an IDD call... so you should not get any of those charges on your bill. So if you see international charges and you never made an international call (the few that call internationally regularly will know they do), it's a fraudulent charge. And those calls to India are probably routed over the Internet nowadays, and not over telephone lines.
If you make an international call, you know you're doing it, and you know you'll be billed for it.
If you receive a collect call, you're given the option to accept or refuse it (this is something I've never used myself; my sister used it a few times calling my parents from abroad where she had to use public phones), and I basically can not imagine this service to be used much.
If they charge you for Internet or club memberships you most likely subscribed to it - otherwise it's of course a fraud. And in any case you should be able to unsubscribe too.
So I don't understand how any of these charges are "mysterious" or even "illegitimate".
Secondly: what about this undetected part? How can this can go undetected on such a grand scale? Do people not get a specified phone bill, listing all charges separately? Do they not actually look at their phone bill to know what they're paying for before writing that cheque?
Unless things work much different in the USA than in (the rest of) the developed world this whole story doesn't sound very believable to me. It just raises too many questions.
The core problem with these micro-transactions is that in such games there tend to be A LOT of transactions. Time and again you have to make a payment. Even if that payment is only 1 or 2 cents (notwithstanding the fact that there is still the issue of processing such payments), time and again the user is asked to make a payment decision. Do you pay or not? Is it worth it, or not?
Or imagine the news paper requiring micro payments. And is asking every article you want to view "this article costs you $0.02, accept?" - that's irritating at best. Having a pre-paid credit that is then automatically debited when you view an article is already better, but you still know you have this payment to make, and you (unconsciously) still have to make the decision if it's worth the extra cost or not.
And that's where it usually goes wrong. However with telephone calls (this is actually a working micro payment: small amounts for each call) people don't seem to have this issue; you pick up the phone and place the call, without thinking too much of the costs. But then a phone call is not as lightheartedly and easily made as clicking on a link to read an article, or to get a new level for a game.
There is much more to micro-payments than the payment amount or the method of payment. It's the psychology that blocks it, and in the end makes it infeasible. And no-one yet has found a way to fix that, really.
It is a task of a government to provide infrastructure. Like the road that leads to your home (or at least to your yard).
The same accounts for power supply: in most countries a power connection is available everywhere at the same price. Postal services will deliver anywhere, again at the same price. Phone lines will be installed anywhere, at the same price. Only restrictions tend to be "no more than 10m off the public road" or so - that means if you have a huge yard and your home all the way at the back, you have to walk down to the road to pick up your mail and lay your own cables for that last part. This is all pretty reasonable.
Now broadband, it's new, but as telephone is/was considered important infrastructure, governments should nowadays at least consider Internet communications infrastructure as well. It's getting more and more important, and as such arguably should receive same status as road and telephone access.
And sure city dwellers sponsor rural dwellers. The same already for mail, telephone, power, even roads.
As the article aptly says, "blame the government". One of the reasons Europe has cheap broadband is government regulation to stimulate competition, keeping prices low. Usually one company owns and maintains all the wires, while ANY OTHER company can gain access to those wires at equal, mandated prices. The government sets this price based on the cost of maintenance plus a reasonable profit for the owner (typically the country's former national telephone company). So any company can sell access, assuring every home may have dozens of broadband providers to choose from.
Similar regulations for telephone and IDD services. And these days the same principle is even extending to railways, especially in freight there are many companies running trains all over Europe, paying the respective infrastructure owners an access fee or toll for using their railways.
The hardest part in implementing these constructions is to split off the infrastructure from the service providers, as traditionally the phone company owned the wires, and provided phone service and later ADSL over those wires. The national railways owned the tracks, and ran the trains on it.
It's just an example of where strong government regulation can actually create a lot of economic freedom. But then it's basically based in the principle that a government's responsibility is to provide an infrastructure where everyone else can gain access to at a predetermined cost, to have an economy flourish. An infrastructure that consists of things like a system of law and order (police, courts), safety (fire, medical), physical infrastructure (roads, railroads, waterways, airports, telecoms), and public transportation facilities (the bus terminals, but not necessarily running the buses).
Yet they pretty much all have telephone cables leading right to their homes. And electricity. And possibly water, sewage and gas pipes. How come that is affordable, and broadband not? It's not that the cables are that more expensive, and you guys tend to have most of it above ground anyway. Just hang another cable on those phone poles.
It seems you're going to be a minority then. And it seems that the "real name" requirement shouldn't be taken so serious anyway, see other comments in this thread.
An estimate 10 million users since launch some two weeks ago, and growing exponentially with an expected 20 million by the weekend. Sure it's a mere fraction of Facebook's estimated 750 million (which surely includes a lot of fake/ abandoned/ company accounts while Google+ is much fresher and thus cleaner in that respect) - yet it's impressive. The amount of press it gets is also impressive. Google+ invites are being offered by my friends on Facebook even.
It makes me really wonder what it is why so many people are so happy to jump on the bandwagon and at least try out the new network. Do they all hate Facebook so much? Is it plain curiousity? The attraction of the Google brand? Is it really that much better than Facebook? Or simply the idea of "something new"?
I haven't tried it (yet) myself. Just curious what makes it that so many people are so happy to jump over - and why Facebook is clearly scared of Google+ (they're suddenly restricting export of your data), while they are obviously not worried about the numerous other social networks that are out there (such as LinkedIn, Hyves, and Google's own Orkut network, and many more).
When presented with the point that it's unlikely the news agency could hold a legitimate copyright, the agency told Techdirt it didn't matter.
Strange that no-one commented on this sentence. I may misread it, but it sounds like the agency doesn't care whether it actually owns the copyright on the photos, it just wants Techdirt to take them down.
And I always thought that to legitimately send out such copyright notices, ownership of the copyright was a requirement. And that if you don't own the copyright, you're committing an offense. Now who owns copyright on those photos I don't know, and that's not the point here. You can't sue someone for infringing works that you do not own to begin with, isn't it?
I agree with that. It's great for customers, not so great for businesses. And when I see the deals I often don't understand why they would participate.
I just bought a groupon for a fancy dinner for two, cost HK$338.00 instead of HK$1,036.00. So the restaurant gets only HK$169 for this dinner, which includes a bottle of wine. I can not imagine they can cover even the ingredients at this price, let alone staff and rent costs. It's been bought by 282 people so far, so the loss of potential revenue for the restaurant is a staggering HK$244,494 (US$ 31,345). OK virtually none of the groupon-buyers would likely have gone for the full fare menu (I for one wouldn't), still they must run a serious loss on this one. I hope they survive (it's way too far out of my area to keep an eye on the place, see whether it survives the upcoming six months).
Most ridiculous offers right now, virtual giveaways: laser hair removal: HK$688.00 instead of HK$16,250.00, and a men's slimming course at HK$899.00 instead of HK$14,160.00. Admittedly I didn't look beyond the headline but well it's a huge discount on offer.
I can't imagine those companies can make any profit out of that. Even if half of those customers remain then still they would have to have dozens of follow-up sales to those customers to make up for the loss. After all profit margins in such industries can't be too great: there is a lot of competition keeping prices competitive.
I have three mobile numbers and two land line numbers on my name and three land line numbers on my company's name (of which one for fax); one of the mobile numbers (the one I use for business) you will be able to find when you search for my company name, possibly my name, but not in the white pages.
On top of that I care much more about junk calls and junk SMSes to my phone than I care about junk e-mails. This as the latter is so much easier to filter out (particularly those junk calls are an issue). No need to advertise my phone number any more than it is already.
It's not just because that Europe has seen wars virtually non-stop for the last 2000 or so years. The last 60, 70 years are a remarkably peaceful era in European history.
I consider everything I put on facebook "public". Even though I tighten my "privacy" settings, be selective with whom I share stuff with - nevertheless anything posted there I consider "public". That means, only things that I don't really mind anyone knowing I will post there.
And for more personal matters, phone or e-mail. Using FB to exchange e-mail addresses is acceptable. Then use e-mail to exchange phone numbers, not FB, as I care more about my phone number than my e-mail address.
FB doesn't exactly have a great track record in keeping things you indicate you want to keep personal, personal. This saga underwrites that again - whatever you say on FB is public. It's a great place for lots of things, but if you want to discuss things you want to keep private, you'd better use a more private communication channel such as e-mail. It may not be perfect but the track record of even webmail providers such as gmail, yahoo, MS is much better than that of FB.
Find list of offending sites. Optional: verify listed sites are indeed serving up offending material.
Check IP address from site; look up who this IP belongs to (which ISP). Build up a nice portfolio, find out which country hosts the most offending sites, and have some national news papers publish that. Shouldn't be too hard if you can get a nice, fact-supported story.
That alone should start some diplomatic channels working. I'm sure there will be enough outcry from the general public that the governments of US, OZ, and other countries can not ignore them. They will have no choice but to have a word with representatives of the country with the offending services who then hopefully feel enough pressure to act and shut down that site.
Rinse and repeat. This will have to be repeated. And sooner or later no ISP is willing to host such content any more, either due to local laws or due to political pressure.
Probably the hardest part is going to be to find the site of offending sites...
We really need to be protecting children from the worst paedophiles of all, marketing executives.
And now it's related to the Internet this suddenly becomes an issue? It wasn't an issue before the Internet? If we really needed to protect the children against marketing execs so badly, we're a few generations too late.
And, don't forget: no insight by the general public into which sites are actually blocked. They will not publish a list of blocked sites, with reason why they are blocked. Sure it will make finding such content easier for people that want to find it, but it's not that they won't be able to find it without the list. And besides, as it's on the block list already so can't be accessed anyway (at least that's the idea of being on the block list).
It really troubles me why those blockers are always so secretive in what exactly they are blocking. Even commercial solutions (net filters targeting parents wanting to make the Internet "safe" for their offspring) will not publish their block list for customers to see what has been blocked and what not.
Slashdot Mirror
You work in some tech or computing related firm, I suppose?
Well if you start out from near-zero getting such increases is easy. Mac was small in Asia, very small. Their main market has always been home turf, Europe a good second.
I have no idea, but when I look around me on the train here in Hong Kong it seems like half the population has an iPhone. OK maybe I'm exaggerating a bit but when you see someone playing with a smartphone it's usually an iPhone. And there are lots of people owning a smartphone. Computers no idea - but at least Apple has a strong brand presence, so that should at least put the mac as option in their minds, and that again will drive sales. And of course when it comes to tablets the iPad rules.
Following the same line of argument you can say the exact same about the US and Japan. Also there many people can not afford or are not interested in buying a computer. This may be related to income, age (too young/old), or simply interests.
Of course the ratio of people that can afford a PC is far higher in US and Japan than in China or India. For now, that is. The latter two are catching up fast, if the effective market (people that can afford it) isn't already bigger in either country than in the US.
You never heard of Steve Jobs' reality distortion field?
My Android phone allows the complete password to be visible when typing (which is convenient, and unless you're in a public space not really insecure to begin with), while by default it will only show the latest letter entered for a few seconds so you can see if it's the right one, hiding it after a few seconds, or when you enter the next character. So very similar to the iPhone.
I have never seen this as a serious security issue. I'd say it's not exactly worse than looking at someone typing on a physical keyboard.
Having that kind of shitty and apparently sky-high bills, well that'd be a reason for me to move to one of the other half dozen or so mobile phone providers. Or use one of the other 100s of IDD service providers. It's as easy as that. That's called a free market for you.
Microcredit sound nice in theory, but I've yet to find one I like.
The 'best' services tend to be those that let you access everything for a fixed price.
This.
You nailed it there, exactly my argument but approached from the opposite side. It will be a long long time before we have working and popular micropayments, if we ever will have it to begin with.
I haven't read the BBC article but have read this in the local Hong Kong paper today.
Lots of sites closed, but the opinions vary on why. The state-sponsored bodies in China claim it is because most of those sites went bankrupt, while others (mainly foreign human-rights activists) claim it's the government forcing them to close. Fact is lots of sites closed, yet the total number of pages available is a whopping 90 billion. Yes that's like 70 pages for every Chinese citizen. And many more if you only count Chinese Internet users.
Some web sites are for sure closed by the government, mainly for pornography, but also sometimes for political speech. Though it seems the Chinese actually enjoy quite some freedom on-line.
And Twitter not available from within China, who cares when you have Weibo? Most Chinese can't read English anyway. And no Google? Well they have Baidu.
Yes it's censored, but no they don't miss out on too much functionality either. It's not that the Chinese can not do those things by themselves, and they do it in Chinese catering to Chinese users. It may be an American viewpoint but all the time I hear "no YouTube, no Google, no Twitter" as if that's the complete Internet?! I'm happy there is more than those few sites. Much more.
And on the importance of Twitter in China... how many non-Chinese will ever look at what's going on on Weibo?
In my case, a $12.95 monthly charge just showed up on my phone bill (land line). There are so many odd items on the bill, it's hard to notice another one.
That amount is more than I pay for my two business fixed lines. Yes that's together. So that's a pretty big sum for a phone bill to appear.
Secondly, "so many odd charges"... you go through the bill once, and tick what you don't know what it is. And make a call to the phone company for explanation. That's what I do with my credit card bill. It's not that hard, it just requires you to care about your money. If you let such sums just stand, sorry to say, but you obviously don't care enough.
In that case you are making a local or 800-number call... you're not making an IDD call... so you should not get any of those charges on your bill. So if you see international charges and you never made an international call (the few that call internationally regularly will know they do), it's a fraudulent charge. And those calls to India are probably routed over the Internet nowadays, and not over telephone lines.
OK disclaimer first: I'm not American.
So I may be getting this totally wrong.
First of all: why are this "mystery" charges?
If you make an international call, you know you're doing it, and you know you'll be billed for it.
If you receive a collect call, you're given the option to accept or refuse it (this is something I've never used myself; my sister used it a few times calling my parents from abroad where she had to use public phones), and I basically can not imagine this service to be used much.
If they charge you for Internet or club memberships you most likely subscribed to it - otherwise it's of course a fraud. And in any case you should be able to unsubscribe too.
So I don't understand how any of these charges are "mysterious" or even "illegitimate".
Secondly: what about this undetected part? How can this can go undetected on such a grand scale? Do people not get a specified phone bill, listing all charges separately? Do they not actually look at their phone bill to know what they're paying for before writing that cheque?
Unless things work much different in the USA than in (the rest of) the developed world this whole story doesn't sound very believable to me. It just raises too many questions.
The core problem with these micro-transactions is that in such games there tend to be A LOT of transactions. Time and again you have to make a payment. Even if that payment is only 1 or 2 cents (notwithstanding the fact that there is still the issue of processing such payments), time and again the user is asked to make a payment decision. Do you pay or not? Is it worth it, or not?
Or imagine the news paper requiring micro payments. And is asking every article you want to view "this article costs you $0.02, accept?" - that's irritating at best. Having a pre-paid credit that is then automatically debited when you view an article is already better, but you still know you have this payment to make, and you (unconsciously) still have to make the decision if it's worth the extra cost or not.
And that's where it usually goes wrong. However with telephone calls (this is actually a working micro payment: small amounts for each call) people don't seem to have this issue; you pick up the phone and place the call, without thinking too much of the costs. But then a phone call is not as lightheartedly and easily made as clicking on a link to read an article, or to get a new level for a game.
There is much more to micro-payments than the payment amount or the method of payment. It's the psychology that blocks it, and in the end makes it infeasible. And no-one yet has found a way to fix that, really.
It is a task of a government to provide infrastructure. Like the road that leads to your home (or at least to your yard).
The same accounts for power supply: in most countries a power connection is available everywhere at the same price. Postal services will deliver anywhere, again at the same price. Phone lines will be installed anywhere, at the same price. Only restrictions tend to be "no more than 10m off the public road" or so - that means if you have a huge yard and your home all the way at the back, you have to walk down to the road to pick up your mail and lay your own cables for that last part. This is all pretty reasonable.
Now broadband, it's new, but as telephone is/was considered important infrastructure, governments should nowadays at least consider Internet communications infrastructure as well. It's getting more and more important, and as such arguably should receive same status as road and telephone access.
And sure city dwellers sponsor rural dwellers. The same already for mail, telephone, power, even roads.
As the article aptly says, "blame the government". One of the reasons Europe has cheap broadband is government regulation to stimulate competition, keeping prices low. Usually one company owns and maintains all the wires, while ANY OTHER company can gain access to those wires at equal, mandated prices. The government sets this price based on the cost of maintenance plus a reasonable profit for the owner (typically the country's former national telephone company). So any company can sell access, assuring every home may have dozens of broadband providers to choose from.
Similar regulations for telephone and IDD services. And these days the same principle is even extending to railways, especially in freight there are many companies running trains all over Europe, paying the respective infrastructure owners an access fee or toll for using their railways.
The hardest part in implementing these constructions is to split off the infrastructure from the service providers, as traditionally the phone company owned the wires, and provided phone service and later ADSL over those wires. The national railways owned the tracks, and ran the trains on it.
It's just an example of where strong government regulation can actually create a lot of economic freedom. But then it's basically based in the principle that a government's responsibility is to provide an infrastructure where everyone else can gain access to at a predetermined cost, to have an economy flourish. An infrastructure that consists of things like a system of law and order (police, courts), safety (fire, medical), physical infrastructure (roads, railroads, waterways, airports, telecoms), and public transportation facilities (the bus terminals, but not necessarily running the buses).
Yet they pretty much all have telephone cables leading right to their homes. And electricity. And possibly water, sewage and gas pipes. How come that is affordable, and broadband not? It's not that the cables are that more expensive, and you guys tend to have most of it above ground anyway. Just hang another cable on those phone poles.
It seems you're going to be a minority then. And it seems that the "real name" requirement shouldn't be taken so serious anyway, see other comments in this thread.
An estimate 10 million users since launch some two weeks ago, and growing exponentially with an expected 20 million by the weekend. Sure it's a mere fraction of Facebook's estimated 750 million (which surely includes a lot of fake/ abandoned/ company accounts while Google+ is much fresher and thus cleaner in that respect) - yet it's impressive. The amount of press it gets is also impressive. Google+ invites are being offered by my friends on Facebook even.
It makes me really wonder what it is why so many people are so happy to jump on the bandwagon and at least try out the new network. Do they all hate Facebook so much? Is it plain curiousity? The attraction of the Google brand? Is it really that much better than Facebook? Or simply the idea of "something new"?
I haven't tried it (yet) myself. Just curious what makes it that so many people are so happy to jump over - and why Facebook is clearly scared of Google+ (they're suddenly restricting export of your data), while they are obviously not worried about the numerous other social networks that are out there (such as LinkedIn, Hyves, and Google's own Orkut network, and many more).
When presented with the point that it's unlikely the news agency could hold a legitimate copyright, the agency told Techdirt it didn't matter.
Strange that no-one commented on this sentence. I may misread it, but it sounds like the agency doesn't care whether it actually owns the copyright on the photos, it just wants Techdirt to take them down.
And I always thought that to legitimately send out such copyright notices, ownership of the copyright was a requirement. And that if you don't own the copyright, you're committing an offense. Now who owns copyright on those photos I don't know, and that's not the point here. You can't sue someone for infringing works that you do not own to begin with, isn't it?
I agree with that. It's great for customers, not so great for businesses. And when I see the deals I often don't understand why they would participate.
I just bought a groupon for a fancy dinner for two, cost HK$338.00 instead of HK$1,036.00. So the restaurant gets only HK$169 for this dinner, which includes a bottle of wine. I can not imagine they can cover even the ingredients at this price, let alone staff and rent costs. It's been bought by 282 people so far, so the loss of potential revenue for the restaurant is a staggering HK$244,494 (US$ 31,345). OK virtually none of the groupon-buyers would likely have gone for the full fare menu (I for one wouldn't), still they must run a serious loss on this one. I hope they survive (it's way too far out of my area to keep an eye on the place, see whether it survives the upcoming six months).
Most ridiculous offers right now, virtual giveaways: laser hair removal: HK$688.00 instead of HK$16,250.00, and a men's slimming course at HK$899.00 instead of HK$14,160.00. Admittedly I didn't look beyond the headline but well it's a huge discount on offer.
I can't imagine those companies can make any profit out of that. Even if half of those customers remain then still they would have to have dozens of follow-up sales to those customers to make up for the loss. After all profit margins in such industries can't be too great: there is a lot of competition keeping prices competitive.
Only if it is listed.
I have three mobile numbers and two land line numbers on my name and three land line numbers on my company's name (of which one for fax); one of the mobile numbers (the one I use for business) you will be able to find when you search for my company name, possibly my name, but not in the white pages.
On top of that I care much more about junk calls and junk SMSes to my phone than I care about junk e-mails. This as the latter is so much easier to filter out (particularly those junk calls are an issue). No need to advertise my phone number any more than it is already.
It's not just because that Europe has seen wars virtually non-stop for the last 2000 or so years. The last 60, 70 years are a remarkably peaceful era in European history.
I consider everything I put on facebook "public". Even though I tighten my "privacy" settings, be selective with whom I share stuff with - nevertheless anything posted there I consider "public". That means, only things that I don't really mind anyone knowing I will post there.
And for more personal matters, phone or e-mail. Using FB to exchange e-mail addresses is acceptable. Then use e-mail to exchange phone numbers, not FB, as I care more about my phone number than my e-mail address.
FB doesn't exactly have a great track record in keeping things you indicate you want to keep personal, personal. This saga underwrites that again - whatever you say on FB is public. It's a great place for lots of things, but if you want to discuss things you want to keep private, you'd better use a more private communication channel such as e-mail. It may not be perfect but the track record of even webmail providers such as gmail, yahoo, MS is much better than that of FB.
You can probably do it even easier.
Find list of offending sites. Optional: verify listed sites are indeed serving up offending material.
Check IP address from site; look up who this IP belongs to (which ISP). Build up a nice portfolio, find out which country hosts the most offending sites, and have some national news papers publish that. Shouldn't be too hard if you can get a nice, fact-supported story.
That alone should start some diplomatic channels working. I'm sure there will be enough outcry from the general public that the governments of US, OZ, and other countries can not ignore them. They will have no choice but to have a word with representatives of the country with the offending services who then hopefully feel enough pressure to act and shut down that site.
Rinse and repeat. This will have to be repeated. And sooner or later no ISP is willing to host such content any more, either due to local laws or due to political pressure.
Probably the hardest part is going to be to find the site of offending sites...
We really need to be protecting children from the worst paedophiles of all, marketing executives.
And now it's related to the Internet this suddenly becomes an issue? It wasn't an issue before the Internet? If we really needed to protect the children against marketing execs so badly, we're a few generations too late.
And, don't forget: no insight by the general public into which sites are actually blocked. They will not publish a list of blocked sites, with reason why they are blocked. Sure it will make finding such content easier for people that want to find it, but it's not that they won't be able to find it without the list. And besides, as it's on the block list already so can't be accessed anyway (at least that's the idea of being on the block list).
It really troubles me why those blockers are always so secretive in what exactly they are blocking. Even commercial solutions (net filters targeting parents wanting to make the Internet "safe" for their offspring) will not publish their block list for customers to see what has been blocked and what not.