http://m.smh.com.au/opinion/blogs/blunt-instrument/free-floppies-a-policy-flop-20130410-2hldq.html
Regardless of what political party you side with, THAT is funny.
Heh. Looks like smh is trying to compete with The Onion.
If I cared about any of these jokers, I could point out the article is ad hominem combined with well-poisoning, but meh.
In reply to Dave's "So what's your solution?"
a. I don't need to have a solution, to have an opinion the present path is probably going to work out badly.
b. One good step towards a solution would be to remove legal restrictions on who can provide telecommunications services. For cable there's no need for spectrum allocation or any such controls. No licensing, no nothing. Just let the market do whatever it wants. Private line-of-sight laser linked local mesh networks, private local copper/fiber LANs/WANs, anything.
c. The biggest infrastructure investment we already have, is Telstra's underground ducts. Use them.
d. I agree getting fiber to every home (including in the outback) is #1 priority. But I don't see this as an excuse for ending up with a system in which the government controls the routing hardware.
e. Allowing the massive investment in co-ax cable TV/net hardware dangling from the street poles, was hugely stupid. At some point all that crap is going to have to be taken down and sent to recycling.
f. Yes, I agree large scale civil infrastructure (water, power, sewage, gas) should be government run. And selling such stuff off to corporate interests was/is a treasonous betrayal of the Australian people. But I'm not so sure about communications infrastructure. It wouldn't be good to have the government (or any small group, hint hint) controlling all newspapers, etc. Same goes for telecommunications, in an age when content is easily monitored and blocked based on content.
g. Any telecommunications architecture that fundamentally includes DRM controls, media content rental, etc, is going to be obsolete after the revolution. Say what you like, but that's going to be the case. Our civilization has to get over this unworkable idea that data can be owned and rented out, or it's going to end in some nasty way.
Nobody is going to try and manipulate the knowledge content of your water or gas pipe. But your internet content - everyone from your local church zealots up to the Rothschilds wants to control that in the baddest way. A net infrastructure has to be designed to STOP that happening, not assist it.
Simple litmus test. Does the NBN allow individuals to realistically run publicly accessible web/ftp servers at home, with useful outgoing bandwidth, no extra cost, and no way for anyone else to restrict the content? I don't know. But I bet it doesn't. When asked, watch them switch from boasting about nearly limitless bandwidths, to talking about how intrinsic bandwidth limitations make such usage infeasible.
Every time I go to the cinema and see the paid 'shiny happy people in a perfect world' advertisements for how excellent the NBN is going to be, my forebodings about this get worse.