Today the Australian government announced their intention to go ahead with building a national broadband infrastructure, themselves. Apparently none of the tenders were up to scratch. Including those from the big players like Optus. Telstra was dumped from the process a long time ago.
Theoretically this is a great move. I have long said that the government made a big mistake when they privatised Telstra. Effectively creating a private sector monopoly on telecommunications. The difference between a public and private sector monopoly is greed. Corporations by their very nature are greedy. When Telstra was privatised it should have been split up into retail and infrastructure. With infrastructure not only servicing Telstra retail but other players. Infrastructure would have remained a public service.
So what the government has just announced is effectively what should have been done 11 years ago. Hooray right? Now for the bad news.
The government has effectively cut out the middle man when it comes to implementing their Internet filter. Since they will control the wire they will also control the Internet. This is great for the government since cooperation from ISPs has been a problem all along. The ISPs have known all along that the filter stinks. It’s bad news for them and it’s bad news for their users. Telstra the largest ISP in the country refused to participate in any trials and during the initial round of trials a lot of the ISPs that did participate dropped out.
Part of the motivation for building this network seems to come from frustration over what the private sector can deliver but the conspiracy theory in me says that a lot of it has to do with pushing it’s paternalistic filtering agenda through. With one hand the government giveth and with the other it taketh away, our rights and liberties, anyway.
