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General discussion

Government incompetence - NBN fibre network in Australia

Aug 18, 2010 8:32AM PDT

There's a federal election in Australia on the 21st of this month. And one of the top 5 issues is actually the internet. The government is promising censorship (protect the children, 'why shouldn't we regulate the internet as heavily as TV' etc) and a 1 gigabit fibre optic network for 93% of Australian houses (all except those in the outback basically). Opposition is opposing both of these policies. And is instead proposing a wireless broadband network instead of fibre, wimax and LTE. Frankly that's also a woeful internet policy. Kind of idiotic, to think wireless can replace wired. But apparently it's a lot cheaper and all they care about is reducing the deficit.
Here's the thing. Telstra is the main telecommunications company here. They own the cable network, copper phone network and are the countries largest ISP. And one of the largest mobile network operators, with 850mhz 3G covering 99% of the population, with HSPA+ at up to 42mbit speeds. They cover a very large portion of the outback and their total network area is 3 times the size of the state of Texas. They are a $25b company, which is massive for a country of only 22 million.
They have been very worried about losing revenue and share price as people move away from landlands to mobiles. Hence years ago they were trying to build a fibre to the node network. Problem is though, their size is a concern, it's of a monopoly level. So they are closely monitored and regulated by the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission). Who refused to allow Telstra to have exclusivity over the infrastructure if they built it or to be able to set their own pricing. As the ACCC refused to give them different rules to what they had for the copper network, Telstra decided against building it. So now we have a situation where the government is building out an expensive fibre network with a government owned company. And the opposition, who might win, are threatening to shut it down and cancel the project if they win.

Discussion is locked

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How can any party so openly supportive of nanny state
Aug 19, 2010 11:03AM PDT

policies? I always thought Australians had a libertarian, stay out of my way attitude towards their government. I guess I was mistaken.

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Well...
Aug 20, 2010 6:51AM PDT

The internet filter is extremely unpopular and seeing wide spread protest, and in every town meeting style election debate, somebody asks the Prime Minister what gives them the right to censor. While other countries like the UK and Canada already have such things, and the public didn't seem to give a damn.
Take a look at this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanfeed_(content_blocking_system)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Censorship_in_the_United_Kingdom

They get away with it, because there are so many other issues in the election, like the economy, illegal immigration, climate change. And to parents and luddites, they can get away with saying, protect the children! The party proposing the filter is the Labor party, centre-left party who's ideology is pretty much exactly the same as the US Democrats.

And in regards to Telstra, they have a monopoly ownership of landlines. And dominate ownership of cable. Regulation to force a monopoly to allow other companies to rent their network is not considered controversial by other major party.
What's controversial is whether the government should be directly starting a company to build out a fibre optic network, or whether they should be subsidising Telstra and others to do it. Anyway, it comes from a similar argument that's in the US, stop the country falling behind in broadband speeds.

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What I noted from that Wiki article,
Aug 20, 2010 6:57AM PDT

"The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) compiles and maintains a blacklist, mainly of child pornography URLs".

Personally I'm all for it. The opposite of that would be that child pornography on the internet is accepted and widely available.

I don't accept that, and anyone who campaigns for 'freedom' from internet censorship which would allow such things must, in my view, be suspect.

Ask yourself this, would you campaign for child pornography to be made freely available on the internet?

Mark

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niceeeeeeeeeee post
Aug 21, 2010 3:58AM PDT

niceeeeeeeeeee post

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Anyone who stands up against religious discrimination
Aug 21, 2010 9:33AM PDT

against muslims who want to build mosques in NYC MUST be suspect. They got to be closet terrorists.

Anyone who stands up for gay rights and same sex marriage MUST be suspect. They have got to be closet homosexuals.

"You're-either-with-us-or-against-us" is the language of extremism.

99.9% of the people who opposed internet censorship also oppose child porn. They just know that filtering and maintaining "blacklists" is not the answer because so much falls through the cracks. And once you give a government the ability to censor your access to information is subjective whims of whatever government happens to be in power.

You fight child porn by arresting those who create, distribute and consume it.

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Yes but...
Aug 21, 2010 10:47AM PDT

I'd also say it's simply ridiculous in a democracy that looking at images of any sort can get people thrown in jail. Yes terrorists and child pornographers. The bill of rights applies to everyone you hate too. Or it's meaningless. The creators are the ones that should be put in jail for child abuse. Distributors and consumers are wittesses to a crime. And should be investigated to help catch the creator.

But anyway. List of the filtered items was leaked. And it's a lie to say it's all child porn. It actually contained a lot of regular porn sites that exceeded classification standards. As well as euthenasia and abortion sites, as those are illegal activities in most Australian states. Who'd seriously trust the government with a filter?

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I don't trust anybody with a filter.
Aug 22, 2010 1:40AM PDT

It doesn't just have to be a government. Even a company with mottos like "don't be evil". Eric Schmidt scares the bejeezus out of me with glib retorts like this:

"All this information that you have about us: where does it go? Who has access to that?" (Google servers and Google employees, under careful rules, Schmidt said.) "Does that scare everyone in this room?" The questioner asked, to applause. "Would you prefer someone else?" Schmidt shot back ? to laughter and even greater applause. "Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?" It was quite the effective moment that showed we still trust government less than we trust Google. But should we trust either?"

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/03/11/top-five-moments-from-eric-schmidts-talk-in-abu-dhabi/

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Broadband Deciding Government.
Aug 21, 2010 11:39AM PDT

Today at 11:35 am 22nd, August, 2010 some facts you need to know for this discussion.
The current Opposition opposes the Internet Filter as does the Greens. This means the Internet Filter is dead.
In the lower house of Parliament called the House of Representatives the Party that is to govern will depend on a Green and some Independents. The major issue that they have in common is support for an optic fibre broadband.
So it looks like access to the Internet at a reasonable price and great speed for the customer is going to decide who governs the country.

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Yeah.
Aug 21, 2010 8:31PM PDT

That's pretty incredible. That broadband policies will decide who's Prime Minister. But it's a measure of how tough things are in the outback economically with the droughts and competition from free trade. Any edge that let's them do business easier in these independent outback electorates is of vital importance.
Why outback has been pretty much forgot by the city dominated parliament. In the cities the economy is great, Australia's unemployment is only 5.3% and there was no recession here.

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That's interesting that the rural Australian residents
Aug 22, 2010 1:29AM PDT

are champions of an open internet (or maybe they just want better service and this is just a happy byproduct of that deal).

I wish we could get Americans to understand how important the a free open and fast internet is to our ability to stay competitive.

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Update
Sep 8, 2010 5:39PM PDT

Well Australia has had it's election and 17 days of suspense. We now have our new Government.
Independents chose Labor mainly on the basis that they were indeed rolling out Fibre to the Home.
It has been confirmed there will be Universal Pricing at the wholesale level.