opinion Australian ISPs, regulators and the Government need to take a step back and stop fooling themselves that future telecommunications competition will rest on ISPs’ ability to provide bundled video content services to users. The reality is that ISPs aren’t good at this task and customers don’t want them to do it.

Over the past few weeks, an old dream has begun to resurface strongly in the ongoing conversation around the future of Australia’s telecommunications industry. In this dream, ISPs and telcos are able to diversity beyond their roots providing telecommunications services such as broadband and telephony to customers. Under this so-called ‘triple-play’ vision, ISPs would add services further up the networking stack, providing video services such as films and television episodes on top of their network infrastructure.

The desire to realise this dream has become very evident in a number of comments made by industry figures over the past year or so.

In a briefing in Sydney yesterday, ACCC telecommunications commissioner Ed Willett said the nature of telecommunications competition could change as the powerful National Broadband Network rolled out, with ISPs competing with content providers for access to video streaming rights. This new world could see ISPs forced to compete with an emerging class of rivals such as Apple and Google for “the primary customer relationship”, Willett said, according to this article published by iTNews. The Australian also has more on this. One can’t help but feel the regulator already has its eye strongly on this new market opportunity, given the provisions it forced on Foxtel in its $1.9 billion buyout of Austar, which ensured some of the pair’s key content holdings would be unlocked for competitive use by ISPs.

Across town, the nation’s biggest telco Telstra was reportedly discussing its “media strategy” with the aid of ex-Television NZ chief Rick Ellis, with the idea raised that the company could make a bid to buy pay TV ConsMedia, which, along with Telstra, part-owns Foxtel and also has interests in Fox Sports Australia.

Meanwhile, at an investment conference held by Macquarie Bank, top-tier ISP iiNet was spruiking its growth strategy. In a broadband market which is experiencing negligible amounts of growth, a core plank of iiNet’s strategy — as with every other ISP — is getting its customers to buy more from it. This means, according to the company’s presentation, getting more people to sign up for its “TV Bundle” — the FetchTV set-top box through which iiNet can get its customers to pay for TV and movies delivered over their broadband connection.

And the nation’s number two telco Optus is also certainly taking the content opportunity seriously.

Like iiNet, the company is pitching the FetchTV offering to its customer. Its chief executive has publicly called for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to regulate content as it does telecommunications access, citing this area as the next major regulatory battleground. And of course the telco has over the past year taken the fight directly to the TV networks with its TV Now cloud-based personal video recorder, which the Federal Court unfortunately shut down last month.

Yes, yes, for Australian telcos at the moment, you can’t escape the feeling that the future is very much about content. Lovely, juicy, value-adding content, streamed on their networks, delivering extra profit margins and locking customers into triple-play or even quad-play (with mobile) bundles. It sure sounds like a lovely vision. But there’s just one problem: If you dig a bit beneath the surface a bit, it’s hard not to escape the conclusion that it’s a false hope.

For starters, it’s important to realise that the ISPs’ forays into content provision over their networks over the past decade have broadly failed.

In total, iiNet has approximately 860,000 broadband customers. But in the almost two years since it launched FetchTV, it has succeeded in converting only 20,000 (two percent) of those customers into FetchTV customers as well. With that abysmal run rate, it’s hard not to make a case right now that iiNet should simply abandon its FetchTV efforts altogether. The project certainly isn’t making iiNet any money. Optus, which launched its own FetchTV offering in Octover 2011, is no doubt doing no better than iiNet on that front right now.

Telstra, which has many millions more broadband customers than iiNet, has fared a little better; in late March this year, the company revealed that it had sold more than 300,000 units of its T-Box Internet video set-top box. Given that the company has some 2.5 million broadband connections using its network, that’s a much better sign-up rate than iiNet’s FetchTV service enjoys — about 12 percent. But it’s not enough to call the platform a success just yet.

But wait, there’s more.

The recent wave of Internet video services launched by the telcos are only their most recent foray into the area of content provided over their telecommunications networks. Before there was content on fixed broadband, there was content on mobile.

A July 2007 article published by the ABC chronicles how Telstra had then launched a service which would allow customers to watch television programs on their mobile phones — for a charge. At the time, then-Telstra executive Justin Milne, who was then in charge of Telstra’s BigPond ISP unit, hyped the device up as a revolution.

“We are inventing a new medium here and what I earnestly hope is that by giving them some slots and making them available to Australian producers to help us invent this whole short form of TV, that the folks will vote with their feet and they’ll buy those shows, and those will become the most popular shows and so we’ll produce more of them,” he reportedly said.

At the time, mobile television was all the rage. Telstra was doing it, Optus was doing it, Vodafone was doing it, and the then-separate Hutchison Telecommunications, developer of the ’3′ network in Australia, was doing it. You could buy individual ‘packs’ through the various companies which would give you access to various slices of content. The only problem was, these types of services never took off. For a time, Australians were interested, but after a while the interest dropped off and the various telco’s efforts to pump content through their mobile networks slowly failed and were largely abandoned.

It wasn’t the first time that this had been tried in Australia, either.

Those of you with slightly longer memories might recall that in late 204, Telstra launched what was then described as an ‘i-mode’ service (imported from Japan, where it was quite popular) through its mobile devices. At the time, the idea was that content providers like eBay, Citibank, CNN, Fox Sports, Whereis, Flight Centre and The Weather Channel would provide portals through Telstra’s mobile devices that would allow customers to buy content directly on their mobile.

But, just like the mobile content wave which would follow it a few years, later, i-mode bombed in Australia and is now remembered as one of Telstra’s greatest mobile-related failures locally.
Now, I don’t want to imply that every attempt by an Australian telco to diversify into content services has failed.

Probably the most high-profile success in Australia in this area — and, by now, you’re wondering why I haven’t noted this elephant in the room — is Telstra’s 50 percent investment in pay TV company Foxtel, and the provision of extremely profitable Foxtel services over Telstra’s HFC cable network. Formed in 1995 through a joint venture between Telstra and News Corporation, Foxtel has historically made a stack of money for both, and you can only get access to it if you have Telstra’s HFC cable running to your door.

Now, it’s true that Foxtel has been a success. But what’s important to realise is that Telstra has had very little to do with that.

Telstra’s role in Foxtel is essentially limited to two areas. Firstly, Telstra is a 50 percent investor in Foxtel, so it has put in a stack of money into the company. And secondly, Telstra maintains the HFC cable network over which the Foxtel services are provided. This is simplifying things a bit, given the complex relationship between Foxtel and Telstra, but when you break it down, you quickly realise that all of the content-related work that goes into Foxtel is done in a separate company to Telstra — one focused on content. The success of Foxtel is based on the fact that Telstra kept its nose out of the content and focused on what it does best — providing telecommunications carriage services to get that content to users.

And every other area where Telstra has attempted to leverage the Foxtel relationship itself, it appears to have broadly failed in.

Telstra’s attempts to provide access to Foxtel content through its mobile phones; Telstra’s attempts to provide access to Foxtel content through its T-Box platform — in short, Telstra’s attempts to leverage its Foxtel relationship through any other avenue than simply providing the telecommunications network for Foxtel to sell pay TV — have broadly failed. In fact, Foxtel is probably experiencing more success offering its services through Microsoft’s stand-alone XBOX 360 platform right now than it is through Telstra’s competing platforms.

Now that we’ve established that ISPs don’t do content very well, the key question which needs to be asked is why. On this front, I think it’s appropriate to go to a quote from Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography. This is vintage Jobs, speaking about the recording industry and why it couldn’t get its own online music store off the ground:

“When I went to Pixar, I became aware of a great divide. Tech companies don’t understand creativity. They don’t appreciate intuitive thinking, like the ability for an A&R guy at a music label to listen to a hundred artists and have a feeling for which five might be successful. They think that creative people just sit around on couches all day and are undisciplined, because they’ve not seen how driven and disciplined the creative folks at places like Pixar are.

On the other hand, music companies are completely clueless about technology. They think they can just go out and hire a few tech folks, but that would be like Apple trying to hire people to produce music. We’d get second-rate A&R people, just like the music companies ended up with second-rate tech people. I’m one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires initiation and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline.”

What’s happening right now in Australia’s telecommunications sector is that the ISPs and telcos are, as Jobs said about the record-labels, hiring second-rate people to enter industries which they don’t understand. The fundamental business of telcos is to provide telecommunications carriage services; not to provide content services. And consequently, telco people just don’t understand the content industry. Telco people think of everything through the lens of their network infrastructure; cables, routers, datacentres. But they don’t think about the content itself — the content, for a telco person, is just something carried on their network.

But providing content isn’t about getting a network right and bundling content onto it. It’s about making that content available wherever a customer wants it, in whatever format they want it; no matter what underlying network may deliver that content. The birth of the Internet has ensured that content has become disaggregated from the network layer that delivers it; and very few customers want to go back to the bad old days where the two are tied irrevocably together, as they are with Foxtel.

Now, I don’t want to argue that the content industry is getting this right either. It has been exhaustively documented right now that Australians are getting a rough deal when it comes to obtaining TV and film content on-line, on-demand and in a timely and affordable manner. But the answer to that problem is not going to come from Australia’s ISP industry.

As the US and UK have also exhaustively demonstrated with companies like Netflix, Apple and Amazon, the solution to that problem will come from a new category of companies which sit in the middle between content owners and consumers, with their service to be provided on top of telecommunications networks, but with no need for an explicit relationship with the providers of those networks. Quickflix founder Stephen Langsford, whose company sits squarely in the middle of this new industry category, nailed this concept in a speech last week; he’s perhaps one of the first executives in Australia to do so publicly.

The Quickflix executive said the best option for Australian consumers was a streaming platform which would offer an unlimited “all you can view” movie and TV streaming service for a single monthly price across any device or platform. This, he said, was an important point because currently in Australia, most companies locked customers in to a particular device, which he said limited the number of consumers who would take up such services. This is the model which has driven Netflix to a level in the US where it accounts for 20-30 percent of all Internet traffic in the country. And it is the model which will see paid Internet video succeed in Australia.

Ironically, Langsford’s speech was given at the same conference where iiNet and Telstra were hyping up their own Internet video options. I wonder if many in the audience appreciated the subtle difference — which will mean the difference between success and failure — between the different philosophies presented.

I suspect not.

Update: This article has been updated with correct T-Box figures. We had estimated about 100,000 sales over the past several years; the correct figure is 300,000.

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opinion The Federal Government should hold a non-constitutional referendum during the next Federal Election on whether Labor’s National Broadband Network should go ahead, in order to settle the long-term fate of this important decade-long infrastructure project once and for all and end the incessant political bickering around it.

In October 1916, as things were beginning to get particularly bogged down in World War I, the Australian Government held its first non-constitutional referendum, an action which is usually, in Australia, described as a plebiscite. The question, according to Wikipedia, was as follows:

“Are you in favour of the Government having, in this grave emergency, the same compulsory powers over citizens in regard to requiring their military service, for the term of this war, outside the Commonwealth, as it now has in regard to military service within the Commonwealth?”

At the time, things were getting a little hairy for the Allies. It would be some months before the United States declared war on Germany, and the famous engagement at Gallipoli the year before had resulted in some very tough times for the Allied countries involved, especially Australia, which for a small country which had travelled halfway around the world to back its British allies had suffered heavy casualties for our short military history — some 8,700 soldiers lost.

With this in mind, the Federal Government of the day had sought to increase its military resources overseas through requiring Australian citizens to serve, gaining a local mandate for the act through a non-binding poll of the Australian population. Unfortunately for the Government of the day, the population voted narrowly against the idea. However, as the war ramped up in 1917, it tried again in December that year, again seeking to bolster Australia’s military forces through conscription. The question, which was also rejected by the Australian population, was:

“Are you in favour of the proposal of the Commonwealth Government for reinforcing the Australian Imperial Force overseas?”

Sixty years later, Malcolm Fraser’s Liberal/Country Party Government held Australia’s third — and last — plebiscite. The question this time had no relation to military service, but again it related to national issues — in fact, one of the very planks of Australia’s national identity, the national anthem. The statement at the time gave Australians a chance to choose a national song to be played on occasions other than certain official ‘regal’ occasions. The options were God Save the Queen (the then national anthem), Advance Australia Fair (which was overwhelmingly the most popular option, with 43.29% of the vote), Song of Australia and Waltzing Matilda.

Since 1977, and before that time, Australia has held a number of constitutional referenda, with the most famous one of late being the 1999 vote on the establishment of a republic and the addition of a preamble to the Constution. But over the nation’s history, there have only been those three non-constitutional referenda, or plebiscites. I give you this history because I want to use it to illustrate that the issue of what type of telecommunications policy Australia should proceed with over the next decade is an issue which is worthy of a national non-constitutional referendum.

Over the past century or so since Australia formed its union, the nation’s government of the day has seen fit to poll its citizens in this fashion on three separate occasions. The first two related to a national emergency — our engagement in a global war and the need to obtain sufficient military resources through conscription. The third was the weighty (hic) matter of what song Australians should sing on occasions when they weren’t forced to sing God Save the Queen.

Clearly, the construction of national telecommunications infrastructure in Australia is not as important as determining the fate of our participation in a war. However, also clearly, it is a significantly more weighty matter than the issue of what song we should sing on particular occasions. It seems obvious that the issue of the NBN falls somewhere in between these two extremes and thus could be worthy of a referendum.

But this doesn’t get to the heart of the reason why I believe a referendum would be useful when it comes to the NBN.

For the past four and a half years since Kevin Rudd’s Labor Government took power and started enacting its then-fledgling NBN policy, Australia’s political sphere has been constantly engulfed in incessant bickering on the issue of the NBN project. The debate has raged constantly, from the technology involved to the economics, from the precise pricing structure to be used to the involvement of Telstra. It has raged through Australia’s Federal and State Parliaments. It has raged in every media platform. It raged during the 2010 Federal Election, and it will rage during the next Federal Election, likely to be held in 2013 if the current Gillard Government can hold onto power for that long.

And yet no agreement has been found.

Just this week, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott savaged the policy and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy filed a vicious salvo at his opposite, Malcolm Turnbull. Every month or so, Turnbull makes a milestone speech slamming the NBN and every other month, Labor makes a landmark national announcement regarding it.

The two sides of politics remain locked in a bitter battle regarding the NBN; one which shows no sign of ceasing.

And yet this is not the type of project which can suffer the constant interruptions which Australia’s three-year electoral cycle enforces on our political system. Any investment in national telecommunications infrastructure on the scale of either the fibre to the home NBN, or the Opposition’s rival fibre to the node plan, must be made over the period of a decade or more. The nation simply cannot change its course on this matter every three years, or even every six years. To achieve any kind of stable telecommunications sector, the nation must commit to a policy on this matter for a decade.

When it comes to roads, when it comes to rail, when it comes to electricity networks, sewers and harbours and airports; other forms of critical national infrastructure; Australia does not make plans on a three-year basis, and the same is true when it comes to telecommunications. It would be simply absurd for the Government to roll out fibre cables to half of Australia and then stop.

And, on current measures, the likelihood is that it will stop. If the Coalition wins the upcoming Federal Election, it will stop the NBN in its tracks while it considers its next step. It will stop the fibre being rolled out, it will halt the execution of plans which have been years in the making. To many Australians, and to many people internationally, this is nothing short of a bad joke.

You do not stop the construction of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric scheme half-way. You do not stop the construction of the Harbour Bridge half-way. You do not construct half a rail line between Adelaide and Darwin. These are absurdities. These are things we should not do. Put simply; it would be bad policy, and bad for Australia.

To avoid this absurdity occurring after the next Federal Election, I believe the current Labor Government should schedule a national non-constitutional referendum (a plebiscite) to be held during that election, on the following question:

“Are you in favour of the National Broadband Network project as envisioned by the Federal Government going ahead?”

Should the answer be “yes”, then the project should go ahead as it is, no matter what side of politics wins power. And, despite the historical trend for Australians to vote down questions in referendums, I believe there is ample evidence to suggest that answer would indeed be “yes”.

Limited polling has consistently shown that Australians are in favour of the NBN. The most recent public poll, taken by Essential Media in February, showed that overall, 56 percent of the country was in favour of the NBN, with only 25 percent opposing it. A further 19 percent didn’t know. In order for an Australian referendum to be voted up, a majority of Australians nationally must vote in favour of the proposal, as well as separate majorities in each of a majority of states (four out of six). On current polling, the NBN would be very likely to win such a double majority poll; given that almost all of the 19 percent currently undecided on the project would need to swing against the initiative, and some of those currently in favour would need to change their minds.

This is the kind of swing which we almost never see during elections; in fact during the recent Queensland State Election, the routed Labor Government only saw a swing against it of 15.61 percent. Worse would need to happen to the NBN ‘yes’ vote in a national referendum, and it’s hard to imagine that happening, given the popularity of the project and the lure of improved service delivery it promises.

Now, I’m not sure what effect such a referendum would have on the Federal Election. But I do know this: Right now, Labor’s NBN project is most likely the most important infrastructure project in Australia. The nation cannot afford to swing back and forth between competing policies for the next decade as the two sides of politics bicker over what path they are going to take every three years.

A non-constitutional referendum is a very clear and decisive way of letting the Australian public have its say on this important issue. And if it is proposed by the Federal Government, it would be a very courageous Opposition indeed which would try to block it.

If you agree with me that a non-constitutional referendum should be held on the NBN, I encourage to you make your views known. Write an article about this on your own site, contact your Member of Parliament, post this article on social media or comment stating that you agree. This is an important issue and I think we need to signal to our political representatives that we need a resolution. I myself will be contacting the various political parties over the next week to ask them if they will support an NBN referendum. And if they will not, given the billions of dollars and years of uncertainty at stake, I will be asking why.

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opinion The Australian Government’s peak IT strategy agency is currently drowning in a sea of technocratic waffle that would do Sir Humphrey Appleby proud. It needs to take a step back and appoint a leader from the private sector to help it focus its efforts on a limited number of high-profile projects which would actually enhance government IT service delivery.

Last week, the Federal Government did something that, after the best part of a decade dealing with it as a journalist, I have become accustomed to never expecting: It gave in and released a large amount of sensitive information voluntarily.

The information consisted of a series of reports and documents which had been commissioned into the performance of the Government’s centralised IT strategy agency, the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO), as well as a separate document put together by that agency to steer technology strategy across government in the coming years.

Now, I had been expecting the worst kind of dogfight to wrest these documents out of the Government’s hands. We only know of their existence because of a successful Freedom of Information request I filed a while back. It exposed the fact that Special Minister of State Gary Gray was pretty concerned about the ability of AGIMO to deliver on its mission of setting central government IT strategy, as well as the existence of a number of reviews examining that issue.

But last Friday afternoon, only days after I filed a second FoI request for the reports themselves, I received an unexpected call from the Department of Finance and Deregulation, which houses AGIMO. The agency, I was told, had decided to release the reports voluntarily through its website that very day. So there was no need for me to persist with my FoI request in the area. At first I was puzzled by this response. Release information voluntarily? The very concept is normally anathema to the Government. But then as I read through the several hundreds of pages of documents which had been released last week, it all started to make sense.

Three reports were released last week. One, put together by AGIMO, constitutes what it describes as a Strategic Vision for the Australian Government’s use of Information and Communications Technology. One, put together by high-profile consultant Ian Reinecke, is a report into that vision. And one, by former broadband department secretary Helen Williams, is a report into AGIMO’s ability to deliver on its vision.

And, despite the three reports in total constituting some 153 pages of expert government opinion, none of them says much of anything at all, in a great amount of detail. If you don’t believe me, I challenge you to read the reports yourself. After a certain number of pages, your brain begins to turn to mush.

AGIMO’s ICT vision predominantly contains a number of high-level statements about the importance of technology to the Federal Government. A representative paragraph:

“Technological developments have increased personal, business and national productivity. ICT has also become fundamental to how government operates. The Government’s use of ICT affects all Australians. People and businesses benefit from simpler, easier-to-use and quicker interactions with Government. The use of ICT-related opportunities is integral to developing government policies and services. ICT offers new ways to design, develop and deliver services, automate existing services, and more effectively consult and engage with a broader range of stakeholders.”

Yes, you might ask yourself; it all sounds very well and good, but what does it actually mean? Or take this paragraph, from Williams’ report into AGIMO’s ability to deliver on its vision:

“Some months ago, [the Secretaries ICT Governance Board] approved a schema summarising a proposed model for cases where a lead agency is required to progress a feasibility study with support from stakeholder agencies. The model gives the lead agency responsibility for project and resource management, for initiating and chairing a cross-agency reference group, for promulgating information to stakeholder agencies and for reporting to the relevant governance committees. AGIMO has been given responsibility for preparing the governance committee papers, ensuring that appropriate terms of reference are prepared for each reference group and providing support for the reference groups.”

Again, you might ask yourself, what does this actually mean? I’ve been writing about technology in government for the better part of a decade now, and to be honest, I really have no idea. Reinecke’s report is a little better. The consultant is quite plain-spoken as an individual, and he often tends to say what he means. But that doesn’t mean his report is lacking a certain style of bureaucratic waffle of its own. Witness the following statement:

“In its current version the implementation plan for the vision has a somewhat ‘technology first’ approach rather than an emphasis on defining business requirements and processes that deliver them effectively … There is an inherent tension between the tactical functions of designing and providing operational support and the strategic approach necessary for policy formation that obliges agencies to undertake specific actions. To conflate the level of authority and type of expertise required for the former with the level of authority required for the latter blurs the governance model and weakens accountability.”

Now, I think it is relatively clear, from the perspective of someone in my position as a reporter and commentator on government technology matters, what sorts of problems AGIMO faces.

The agency’s fundamental role is that of an organisation setting technology policies and strategies across the entire Federal Government sector — from Tax to Human Services, from Defence to Customs, and all the tiny agencies in between. However, it sits in the middle between a number of powerful organisations, and has very little real power to enforce outcomes on those organisations, or any control on how they spend their money.

Thus, you get individual agencies signing individual contracts with major suppliers, ignoring the potential to save money through cross-government scale, and individual agencies rolling out individual IT projects, without regard to how standardisation could aid collaboration across government.

In an environment with limited IT staffing resources to start with (predominantly, Canberra) and at a time of intense technological change when governments right around Australia and the globe are struggling with problems of governance of IT projects, AGIMO has often been left in an untenable position in the Government; sometimes, I would anticipate, screaming into a void.

If you try hard to get beyond the waffle and read between the lines of the reports released last week, you can see these problems coming up again and again. The issues with governance, especially associated with the Secretaries ICT Governance Board and its arcane processes. The necessity, when working cross-government, of constantly trying to translate high-level motherhood statements into tactical approaches to generating real-world outcomes. And especially, a constant public sector mandate that all t’s must be crossed and I’s dotted, lest the heavy gaze of each department’s political masters come down on them, following a failed initiative.

In government, every decision must be able to be justified to the Nth degree, and every ass must be covered in the event of problems.

But what strikes me about the information released over the past week or so by AGIMO and the Finance Department in general, is that as this bureaucratic miasma of biblical proportions proceeds unchecked, an opportunity is being lost for some clear-sighted wins in the Federal Government. There is so much waffle in and around AGIMO right now that any actual leadership being shown by the agency is being obscured.

If you read between the lines of Special Minister of State Gary Gray’s internal memo about AGIMO, what strikes me is that it appears that the Minister, also is struggling with the same issues that I am about the agency; namely: What does it do? Is it doing a good job at that? And what should its focus be in future?

Public servants have long known that in Government, the way to generate substantive change is to get a small number of popular big ticket projects approved, and then tack smaller initiatives onto them under their large overarching umbrella. Good examples in the current Federal Government would be the way that Stephen Conroy’s National Broadband Network project is attempting to meet a number of complex policy objectives through attacking the populist issue of universal access to fast broadband, or the way that the Australian Taxation Office bundled a number of wide-ranging IT projects under the larger “Change Program” umbrella.

But if I look at AGIMO right now, I feel as though there is a vast gulf between the way that politicians such as Gray view the agency, and what they would like it to achieve, and the way that AGIMO and other departmental bodies view it.

Ideally, Gray and Labor in general would like AGIMO to be involved in the kind of big ticket projects which would illustrate to the public that Labor was achieving dramatic and positive internal change in the way the Government uses technology. In contrast, I feel that AGIMO feels much of its work is in tying together little things into bigger outcomes; setting standards across government, for example, or helping departments review IT projects. You know, the kind of things that slowly increase the quality of IT governance within the public sector, but which don’t necessarily create a big public splash.

You can see that AGIMO is trying to target these big ticket items. The agency’s work on centralised IT procurement, with whole of government contracts with vendors like Microsoft, is a good example of this. And AGIMO has also given a strong boost towards public sector accountability, through so-called Web 2.0, social media and document licensing initiatives. It’s been trying, but broadly failing, I would argue, to make some headway on cloud computing strategies.

But my overwhelming feeling, which returns every time I read another report about the agency, is that it’s not focusing enough on those big ticket items which would give it a more visible presence within Government; a presence that would demonstrate that what it’s doing matters, and that it’s having a real impact on the way the public sector uses technology. In short: AGIMO can’t focus. It’s an agency which needs to help oversee the public sector and push it in a certain direction. But it’s become too much a part of that same public sector for it to be effective at that task. It’s enmeshed in bureaucratic waffle, with no immediate hope of breaking free.

In my opinion, what its political masters need to do with AGIMO is to stop reviewing its operations and asking it to present reports. The agency needs new, dynamic, vigorous leadership; ideally from the private sector, from an industry like financial services and banking which has similar cross-jurisdictional issues, and it needs a beefed up mandate so that government departments and agencies would find it very hard to say “no” when it comes calling asking for change. It needs decisive action and vision, of which it currently has little. It shouldn’t take a year for AGIMO to get an ICT strategy approved. What it should take is a direct call from the leader of the agency to the Prime Minister.

This kind of change is not unprecedented, in at least one jurisdiction which Australia loves to compare itself to.

In the US, then-new US President Barack Obama unleashed a wave of change in the country’s Federal public sector with the 2009 appointment of Vivek Kundra as its first whole of government chief information officer. For all his faults (and I have severely criticised him previously for leaving his role too early for a job at cloud computing vendor Salesforce.com), Kundra was successful in the role by harshly focusing on just a handful of projects.

Kundra’s Data.gov, IT dashboard, TechStat and whole of government cloud computing initiatives profoundly changed the way the US Government as a whole manages technology projects, in just a short two-year period in which he held his office. Kundra was also successful in getting top-level executive buy-in from Obama himself.

It’s hard to imagine AGIMO getting to the point where it has the direct support and interest of Australia’s Prime Minister of the day in its efforts. And its certainly hard to imagine Australia’s current whole of government CIO Ann Steward wielding the same influence in our federal public sector as Kundra did in his. But there is no doubt that this is the sort of ambition which the agency should be holding. I know that a number of senior CIOs in Australia’s Federal Government — not to mention in the private sector as well — have closely followed Kundra’s efforts and are aware of the change going on in the US Government right now. Why aren’t we seeing these kinds of ideas incorporated into AGIMO’s approach in Australia?

You might have wondered what the picture was at the top of this article. That photo is of US President Obama testing out Kundra’s IT dashboard outside the Oval Office in the White House. That’s the sort of executive buy-in which AGIMO should be aiming for in Australia. It’s real, it exists and the agency is capable of it, if it puts its thinking cap on and its nose to the grindstone.

But the sort of vision which we’re currently seeing from AGIMO just isn’t going to get it there.

Image credit: Pete Souza, public domain

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3. Wong passes AGIMO baton to Gray

opinion The Federal Government should ignore the pathetic demands of the film and TV industry for new legislation to “exterminate” Internet piracy and instead wait for the sector to fix the blatantly obvious problems with its commercial model, following its latest loss in Australia’s High Court. Australia’s copyright law works well as it stands, and does not need changing.

If there is one thing which Australia has learnt by now about the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, it is that, like the Daleks of the classic Dr Who television series, the organisation and the coalition of global and local film and TV studios which back it simply never gives up.

AFACT has now suffered no less than three defeats in Australia’s courts system in as many years in its high-profile case against Internet service provider iiNet. After its initial case was filed against iiNet in November 2008, the Federal Court first knocked back AFACT’s claim that iiNet was authorising the infringement of copyright through letting its users use the BitTorrent file-sharing platform in February 2010. Not satisfied with that result, AFACT appealed, and was knocked back again twelve months later. AFACT subsequently appealed again, and on Friday last week, the organisation lost yet again, with the High Court — the last court of appeal — denying AFACT any avenue of future legal recourse against iiNet. That’s right: Every year, for the past three years, Australia’s courts have found that AFACT’s pursuit of its case against iiNet is illegitimate. It’s beginning to be an annual tradition.

And yet, like the Daleks (who also tend to appear at least once a year, sometimes in the December Christmas special), AFACT just keeps on coming, in its fruitless quest to ‘exterminate’ file sharing at any cost. One gets the feeling that, like the Daleks, AFACT could survive almost any catastrophe with its mission intact. No matter how many times The Doctor blows up, dismantles or re-orients the Daleks, they never completely disappear from the picture, and repeatedly re-appear to challenge the Earth one more time and destroy all human life as they know it.

One can’t help but imagine that AFACT could similarly suffer any number of court losses and never give up. Every single time it loses, the organisation’s executive director Neil Gane appears for a public press conference, dogmatically repeating the same messages. “EXTERMINATE!” he screeches for the TV cameras. “INTERNET PIRACY MUST BE EXTERMINATED!”

Now the weakness of the Daleks has always been that they are highly single-minded, and thus fairly predictable. They accept no compromises and do not wish to co-exist with other species, preferring instead to eradicate them. Thus, it came as no surprise that (as several pundits predicted — here and here — following the verdict last week), the similarly single-minded AFACT did not accept its third legal defeat in as many years, but immediately flagged its intention to appeal to a higher power: The Federal Government. However, just as The Doctor continually rejects the Dalek’s single-minded approach, there are a number of reasons why Australia’s Government should reject AFACT’s call for legislative redress for its problems.

Firstly, the Government must take into account the fact that Australia’s copyright regime is currently functioning well for other industries.

The music industry, which had historically taken a similarly litigious view of Internet piracy as the film and TV studios, backed away from the issue after it became clear that consumers preferred convenient legal download options such as Apple’s iTunes. Version 2.0 of the legal online music paradigm is now entering Australia with the launch of music streaming services such as Spotify and Rdio. The games industry has similarly worked within existing copyright law to transition its business model towards legal online downloads through platforms such as Valve’s Steam, Microsoft’s Xbox Live, Sony’s PlayStation On Demand and more. Video game piracy doesn’t appear to be a major problem in Australia at the moment, with the overwhelming majority of customers preferring legal options instead of illegal ones.

And lastly, even the book industry, which also produces a wide range of content, has also resolved most of its digital issues, with platforms such as Amazon’s Kindle store and Apple’s iBooks providing lucrative ways for authors to make returns on their content generating investment without resorting to enforcement action on ISPs.

The film and TV studios appear to be the only segment of the broader content industry which has been unable to transition to a new digital reality within Australia’s current copyright regime. If the Federal Government changes Australia’s copyright law to introduce some kind of mandatory industry protocol between ISPs and film and TV studios on the issue of Internet piracy, it has to face up to the fact that it may unlock Pandora’s box and destabilise the very strong progress which has been made on other fronts in monetising the digital environment.

In short, it appears apparent, given the experiences of other related industries, that the Internet piracy issues being experienced by the film and TV studios are problems of their own making — because they have not transitioned to a new digital model — rather than the sort of systemic legislative issue which would need to be addressed centrally by the Government.

Secondly, there is the problem of the rights holders’ intractability on the issue. The Daleks have never accepted any compromise when it comes to the extermination of the human race, and content owners have similarly demonstrated over the past year a lack of willingness to seriously sit down and negotiate with respect to their problems.

The Government (in the form of the Attorney-General’s Department) has already been holding talks between the ISP and content industries on the issue of online copyright infringement; talks involving AFACT and other content industry groups, and iiNet and other ISP industry groups. As iiNet regulatory chief Steve Dalby said publicly several weeks ago, the talks have been going nowhere, with the two sides locked rigidly on opposite sides of the online copyright infringement fence and unwilling to meet each other in the middle. “The rights holders want all the benefits of remedial action, but want the ISPs to foot the bill,” he said. “ISPs don’t want to pay to protect the rights of third parties. The gap between the parties is considerable and unlikely to close.”

However, although Dalby has characterised the talks as being between two sides, neither of which wants to give any ground, this portrayal is actually inaccurate.

The truth is that Australia’s ISP industry has shown itself quite willing to compromise on the issue of online copyright infringement. In November last year, the ISPs proposed an anti-piracy education and warning scheme which would see allegedly infringing customers issued with education notices, leading eventually to a so-called ‘discovery’ notice which would allow rights holders to eventually pursue individual customers themselves through the courts. However, at the time, the Australian Content Industry Group categorically rejected this scheme, stating that it fell “well short of the expectations we had had for an open, balanced and fair solution”. It was basically a “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” kind of answer — no quarter given.

What this should indicate to the Federal Government is that if it does examine the case for modifying Australia’s copyright law, it will not find a reasonable and practical argument on the case coming from the film and TV studios being represented by AFACT. Instead, what it will find is a strongly one-sided argument which will not aid it in making good policy and balanced legislation. Why should any Government deal openly with such an intractable and single-minded group of organisations? The reality is, it shouldn’t. The Federal Government should wait until the film and TV studios appear prepared to negotiate a balanced case before stepping in on the issue of online copyright infringement. Only then would it achieve any ground on the issue.

Lastly, there is the issue of the Government’s own position on the issue.

The fact that the two sides of the debate — ISPs and content owners — are so strongly opposed in the copyright infringement debate leaves the Government with nowhere to go on the issue. It cannot afford to take one side or the other, for fear that it will bring the wrath of the other down upon its head. If it enforces an arbitrary enforcement mechanism on Australia’s ISPs, it risks huge public displeasure and even the possibility of court challenges. Don’t discount the power which telcos like Telstra wield. When Telstra speaks — as it has in the past, backing iiNet on the issue of Internet piracy — Australia’s public listens.

If it goes too far towards the other side, however, publicly backing the ISPs completely on the issue, the Government risks alienating the powerful media interests, especially the US film and TV studios which have been central to a wave of US legislation aimed at curbing Internet piracy globally. The Australian Government does not want to be seen to be publicly rebuking the sorts of US interests represented by the content industry.

Thus the government’s preference for an industry-led settlement on the issue — a position which allows it to avoid irritating both local and global stakeholders. By doing nothing, Australia’s Government is right now thinking, it will upset no-one.

When you take all of these factors into account — the fact that Australia’s copyright regime is working for other branches of the content industry, the lack of willingness by AFACT and its backers to negotiate on the issue at all and the treacherous minefield the Government faces in forming policy in this area — it seems obvious that the Government should ignore AFACT’s demands for legislative relief following the iiNet High Court case and simply sit on its hands for a while to see how the situation pans out.

My personal bet is that in three to four years, the issue will have gone away entirely, as the film and TV industry moves to new commercial models delivered entirely through the Internet. With the music, games and book industries already having gone strongly down this path, it is only a matter of time before the film and TV studios do too, resolving the matter once and for all — in the favour of consumers, and the funding of great content widely available on the right terms for all.

If the Government waits a little, one suspects, this troublesome debate and perhaps even AFACT itself will be exterminated — once and for all.

Image credit: Tony Hisgett, Creative Commons

Related posts:

1. AFACT to appeal some iiTrial court costs
2. Back in your box, EFA tells AFACT
3. AFACT demands Govt action over iiTrial loss

opinion In mid-2008, a government staffer at an employee town hall meeting being held by the US State Department got up to ask Secretary of State Hilary Clinton what appeared to be a rather unusual question for the venue. “Can you please let the staff use an alternative web browser called Firefox?” asked public affairs officer Jim Finkle.

“I just moved to the State Department from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and was surprised that State doesn’t use this browser.”

As a round of unexpected applause from State Department staff exploded around the room, Finkle pushed on. Like a seasoned journalist in the White House press gallery, he bluntly explained his rationale to one of the most powerful political figures in the world. “It was approved for the entire intelligence community,” he continued, “so I don’t understand why State can’t use it. It’s a much safer program.” A taken-aback Clinton didn’t seem to know how to react, according to the transcript available online. “Well, apparently there’s a lot of support for this suggestion,” she laughed, before passing the baton to departmental under-secretary Pat Kennedy.

To Clinton — and no doubt to many in the audience, the request must have seemed an odd one. Probably, the Secretary of State thought, there would be more important organisational matters which State Department employees could have raised with her in that very public venue. Questions of internal policy, problems of how to best implement government programs, even cross-jurisdictional issues between the State Department’s many far flung facilities. And indeed, other questions did touch on these areas.

But the Firefox question was clearly taken seriously by State at that point — with Kennedy going to great pains to respond to Finkle’s issue and confirming support for the upstart Mozilla browser. And despite the difficulty of mobilising any change in an organisation the size of Clinton’s department, the question did get resolved. In March this year, State announced it had rolled out not Firefox, but Google’s similarly advanced Chrome browser to 60 percent of its 100,000+ desktop PCs in a bid to give employees more browser options.

The root cause, of course, of Finkle’s complaint to Clinton was that he was being unnecessarily forced to use decade-old technology at work.

With the launch of Windows XP in late 2001, Microsoft for the first time successfully married the dramatically more stable operating system kernel it had fundamentally re-written for Windows NT, and matured with Windows 2000, with the consumer- and business-friendly features of its more mainstream operating system lines, which had their genesis from Windows 95, through 98 and then ME. Over time, XP would come to be so stable and popular that more than a decade later, every large Australian organisation would still be running it in some form, somewhere — and a huge amount are still running it on the majority of their staff desktop machines.

However, the ubiquity of XP also birthed what Valve Software would refer to as ‘unforeseen consequences’: It entrenched the bundled Internet Explorer 6 browser as a hideous web standard. With the one true desktop operating system came the one true web browser. And this standardised platform delivered a new era of corporate productivity as large organisations all over the globe developed a new-found enthusiasm for developing in-house applications delivered through a web browser.

But now the worm has turned; the snake is eating its own tail.

In their struggle to continue to support those internal applications, large organisations have proven extremely reluctant to upgrade their internal desktop standard operating environments to new versions of Internet Explorer and to completely ignore rival software platforms — leading to the kind of negative productivity, privacy and security outcomes which the launch of IE6 in 2001 hoped to avoid.

IE6′s strangehold over Australian organisations is no less strong than it is in the US. Westpac. The Australian Taxation Office. The Department of Defence. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia. And, of course, other government departments beyond count in Australia. All of these are organisations that have admitted over the past two years to still using version 6 of Internet Explorer. Some of them have started upgrading, but where they have, they have typically only upgraded to Internet Explorer 7 — which is nearly as bad.

The problems which IE6 suffers are obvious to anyone who has spent any time either using a web browser or developing a web site.

In the words of Microsoft itself, which has started an Internet Explorer 6 death watch page to try and kill off the Frankenstein monstrosity it birthed a decade ago: “The web has changed significantly over the past 10 years. The browser has evolved to adapt to new web technologies, and the latest versions of Internet Explorer help protect you from new attacks and threats.”

Usably fast JavaScript. Support for tabbed browsing. Searching from the address bar. Protection against Internet malware. Memory protection between tabs and from the operating system. The ability to resume downloads. The ability to add popular plugins to bolster its core functionality. granular privacy controls. These are just some of the modern browser features which virtually every modern browser — including recent versions of IE itself — support, that IE6 doesn’t. As an information professional, no doubt Finkle wished to do something as simple with his desktop PC as open new tabs for new web pages he was referencing in his work. Yet this basic feature — and many others — is simply not available in IE6.

Beyond that, IE6 often just doesn’t work, in any practical sense. The browser’s lack of support for modern web standards means many modern web sites just don’t view correctly, or sometimes at all, when viewed with IE6.

Now, I understand why organisations have stuck with IE6 (and now, increasingly, IE7) for so long. It’s a no brainer. Faced with the choice of re-developing a core business application or replacing it completely, it is an easy choice to keep employees on a supported web browser rather than invest in a new system, which could be significantly expensive to deploy. When so many organisations have standardised so heavily on Microsoft software throughout their operations, any wholesale shift to a replacement web browsing platform is going to involve a lot of work which most of the top decision-makers will consider an unnecessary distraction from more important tasks.

However, what I don’t understand is why so few major organisations in Australia or globally have done what the US State Department has done and deployed a second web browser as a complement to that core Internet Explorer functionality.

In the consumer world, having a second or even third browser installed on your desktop PC is de rigeur. Any self-respecting geek wouldn’t be caught dead using an old version of IE at home, when the broadly faster, more stable and more capable Firefox and Chrome platforms are available, and I can distinctly remember the relief experienced by my older relatives when I installed one of these alternate browsers on their home PC half a decade ago. Suddenly, they told me, the Internet “just worked”. Funny, that.

Corporate workers are well aware of this trend, and the anger about the fact that it has not penetrated into many workplaces has often spilled out in public. The US State Department example is a good one, but in Australia there are also many government staffers (particularly high-powered ministerial advisors) who take their personal MacBooks into the office to get their work done on an everyday basis, only using their office PC when forced to interact with some arcane official system.

In the past, much of the rationale against alternative browsers in the workforce related to the idea that Internet Explorer was much more centrally manageable from an IT department’s perspective than Chrome or Firefox. You wouldn’t want to have a dozen versions of Firefox deployed around your organisation, the argument went; that would make it impossible to administer centrally when it came to security settings and minor upgrades. However, over the past few years this argument has become more and more irrelevant. Both Google and Mozilla have implemented centralised management strategies for their browsers which play well into the existing software administration strategies which are in play in IT departments.

When you take all of this into account, as well as the fact alternative browsers such as Chrome and Firefox are well … completely free to implement, and most people would find it trivial to use them alongside any version of IE (meaning there is no need to train staff to use something they probably already use at home), the lack of corporate rollouts of alternative browsers in Australia becomes somewhat mystifying.

The last time Delimiter touched on this topic, in September 2010, we found it very hard to find any major Australian organisation officially running anything other than Internet Explorer, apart from organisations like IBM and De Bortoli Wines, which have had a conscious philosophical preference for using open source software where possible. At the time, a spokesperson for the Australian Government Information Management Office (the central IT strategy group for the Federal Government) said that over 96 percent of government PCs used Internet Explorer, with Firefox boasting a share of just three percent. And Mozilla issued a blanket statement noting it wasn’t aware of any major rollouts in Australia.

Not much appears to have changed since then.

A false dichotomy
In my opinion, the greatest problem which alternative browsers face in attracting the interest of Australian IT managers is the belief that they’re not needed. When major Australian organisations set centralised IT policy for large workforces, they usually like to standardise on a discrete set of technologies which are easily deployed and maintained, popular amongst their peers and capable of performing more than one task, if possible. This trend can be seen in virtually every sphere in Australia’s enterprise IT sector.

In unified communications, organisations are increasingly standardising on Microsoft, Cisco and Avaya. In desktop software, Windows, Outlook/Exchange, Office and SharePoint. In network infrastructure, Cisco and HP ProCurve. Dell and HP on the desktop, SAP and Oracle for business applications, Telstra or Optus for telecommunications, VMware and sometimes Microsoft for virtualisation. EMC or NetApp for storage; and the list goes on in this vein.

What this means for alternate browsers is that many IT professionals believe the deployment of Internet Explorer in the enterprise means the ‘problem’ of which web browser to deploy on their organisations’ desktops has already been solved. Web browsers are the desktop software version of a Swiss Army Knife, the philosophy goes — able to perform virtually any task that they’re set to. You need only install one, and the world would come alive at your fingertips.

However, it should be obvious by now that this belief, like many beliefs common within specialised professions, represents a false dichotomy. When it comes to web browsers, Australian organisations should not be choosing one for their staff to use. Instead, they should choose several, as they are often used for different purposes. Rather than choosing to head left or right, IT managers should choose both simultaneously.

Right now, many Australian organisations are grappling with the so-called Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend, which is seeing employees seek permission to bring in their own personal technology (laptops, iPads, smartphones) from home for use at work, with a view to working more efficiently and achieving higher levels of productivity. In the microcosm of the web browser choice paradigm, we can see why this trend is currently so powerful and pervasive. IT professionals are too often blocking employees from access to harmless pieces of technology which would allow them to do their job better.

Too often, IT departments are asking the question “Why?” But increasingly, like humble public affairs staffer Jim Finkle questioning Hilary Clinton in front of her entire senior staff, the employees they are supposed to be serving are asking them: “Why not?”

Related posts:

1. Desktop dictatorship: Corporate Australia still prefers IE
2. Australia’s desktop PC paradigm is under siege
3. IT’S MANDATORY: Govt forces open source option

This article is by Peter James, the managing director of cloud computing company Ninefold. It first appeared on Ninefold’s blog and is re-published here with the company’s permission.

opinion Back in 2009, the NSW government commenced a process to identify a vendor to build two datacentre sites in the state – one in Sydney and one in the Illawarra region. However, this process is potentially becoming another Steven Bradbury moment, awarding the prize to the last person standing.

The original plan was for those datacentres to be built and operational by 2011/12, and then used by all NSW government agencies. A major factor in this consolidation was the volume of small, inefficient datacentres and expensive co-location space taken up by the various agencies acting independently. The model was based purely on co-location capacity and assumed that the state government would continue to invest large CAPEX dollars in IT hardware.

From a list of 17 respondents, the initial expressions of interest were shortlisted to five players; each invited to respond to a request for tender (RFT) issued by the government in November 2010. At that stage, it was forecast before the March state election that the facilities would be available in 2012.

Since that RFT was first issued to the five shortlisted vendors, three have dropped out. Now down to just two players, and more than a year after the tenders closed, there has still been no winner announced. Indeed, there has been periodic speculation that the RFT will – and should – be cancelled.

Regardless of the outcome, the winner will still need to complete the planning process and then build the new facilities. Based on industry experience, it is likely to be at least two years before these NSW government facilities will become fully operational – some five years after the consolidation process was first proposed.

In the meantime, the Federal Government has established a panel of multiple providers. This panel is open for the NSW Government to use with a minimum take-up of 500 square metres or 500kW of IT load. Nine of the datacentres included in the panel are (or are planned to be) based in NSW. New datacentres continue to be announced, including facilities for Macquarie Telecom, Fujitsu and Hewlett-Packard. The private sector has responded to demand and is rushing to meet supply.

So why is it that the NSW government continues to run a tender to invest in purpose-built facilities? Why continue to pursue old-world thinking that is based on a long-term lease (minimum of 10 years) with a committed footprint? The need for physical space is diminishing rapidly, with virtualisation and now cloud technology becoming more prevalent. Indeed, it is not even based on power – where we are simultaneously seeing a push to higher density computing.

Is this another white elephant? When is the state government going to join us in the 21st century and commit to cloud computing? Vivek Kundra, the former US Federal Chief Information Officer, responded to the multiplicity of US government datacentres by mandating agencies begin using cloud technology – they have forecast savings of over $20 billion.

Today, all governments are feeling the pressure of tight, fiscally driven budgets. Cloud infrastructure provides an opportunity to match usage to demand as and when required. There is no need for over-spec’ing to ensure capacity is there at some future date. Surely it is time for some fresh thinking in NSW government procurement – as taxpayers, don’t we deserve it?

Related posts:

1. Can Australia lead global cloud market?
2. Federal Govt kicks off cloud purchasing cycle
3. Westpac: A case study for the complex cloud

The following is an editorial by former Victorian Premier John Brumby, who is also a board director of Huawei Australia. It was first published in the Financial Review this morning and is re-published here with Huawei’s permission. It comes following the news that Huawei has been banned for national security reasons from tendering for National Broadband Network contracts.

opinion This week Treasurer Wayne Swan made a speech to the Australia-China Business Council where he asked if Australia would be ‘on the right side of history’ in the Asian Century. It is the question facing every Australian as our nation becomes increasingly interdependent – economically, culturally, and politically – with our Asian neighbours. But as Australia balances its policy settings around security, trade, economics, and more, it is critical that Australia fully appreciates the huge growth of innovation and research in the modern Chinese economy.

Innovation is the engine room of the new China. China is no longer simply the world’s manufacturing hub, it is now a world leader in research and development, competing against global rivals in terms of new patent applications and new technologies. Incredibly, China became the world’s top patent-filer for the first time in 2011 – ahead of the US and Japan. Huawei, a company unknown to most Australians, became the world’s number-one company for new patent applications in 2008 and has been in the global top-five for new patent applications for the past four years. And Huawei is not alone, as more Chinese companies enter the top rankings for new patent applications according to the World Intellectual Property Office.

While China has much to gain from Australian R&D, it is equally true that Australia has much to gain from China’s innovation – and much to lose from missing out on the innovation China has to offer. As the Treasurer rightly noted in his speech, we are at a “contemporary defining moment” at the beginning of the Asian Century. To define Australia’s relationship with China as one based predominantly on resource exports would be to our nation’s great and lasting detriment. Opening up our respective economies to the free flow of new ideas, new technologies and new innovation would establish an unshakable foundation for our future growth.

As Australia’s economic prosperity becomes reliant on China’s rise, policy makers have to adjust to this new era of the modern China – the China that leads the world in wind energy, solar energy and new IT applications. This will take time as we try to cope with the size and pace of China’s evolution. But it would be a serious mistake indeed to think of China as simply a buyer of raw materials and a maker of goods.

It is beyond doubt that robust sales of natural resources to China has provided Australia with a solid foundation during the massive global downturn of the past three years. However, if the International Monetary Fund is correct and the world is teetering on the brink of a further recession, then it is unarguable that Australia’s best interests will be served by a more dynamic and more open trade and investment relationship with China.

In short, we need to take our relationship with China to the next level and in doing so take a less sceptical view of Chinese participation in Australia. For Australia to fully capitalise on the unprecedented opportunities offered by a stronger economic relationship with China, policymakers must incorporate into their thinking what China can bring to Australia.

Modern China is no longer just about cheap imports and buying Australian resources. The investment China has made in Research and Development has seen a dramatic growth in China’s ability to innovate and produce high-end specialised equipment and products. Huawei for example invests 10% of its annual revenues back into R&D, a sum of over US$3bn every year. That figure alone equates to around 10% of Australia’s total annual spend on R&D.

Yet despite the overwhelmingly positive role played by private companies like Huawei in the Australian community, some still view Chinese participation with scepticism – or even actively discourage it. I would argue that such a strategy puts more than just thousands of local jobs at risk – it puts the future of Australia’s own economy at risk. Policy makers are right to question the potential security implications of foreign investment from any nation, and China should be no different. However, if Australia falls for a one-size-fits-all policy approach to these important questions, it demonstrates a lack of understanding of what modern China offers to the Australian economy.

Huawei’s submission to the “Australia in the Asian Century” White Paper makes it clear that Australia has much to benefit from China’s innovation. “Barriers, placed through restrictive market and trade regulations or practices, reduce opportunities to gain maximum advantage of technologies and their benefits,” it notes.

Once the headlines have faded and the media cycle has moved on, Huawei is hopeful that there will still be an opportunity for us to play a future role in Australia’s broadband network. The NBN will take many years to deploy, and in the meantime we are fully committed to growing our business and we will continue to deliver the world’s best technology to our customers and the Australian population.

If we are to fully capitalise on the benefits of the Asian Century, we need to fully embrace Chinese innovation and R&D in exactly the same way we would with any other country. To do anything else would risk Australia not being ‘on the right side of history’.

Image credit: Science in Melbourne 2007, Creative Commons

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1. Turnbull embarks on Asian broadband tour
2. Govt’s treatment of Huawei is inconsistent
3. History is the key to understanding Huawei

opinion In its criticism of the media coverage of the launch of Apple’s new iPad in Australia this week, the ABC’s normally stellar Media Watch program went too far, alleging journalistic impropriety where there was none, and unfairly targeting media outlets for legitimately covering an important news story which the public was interested in.

I have for a long time (dating back to the days of then-host Stuart Littlemore in the 1990′s) been a stalwart fan of Media Watch. The show’s role as a watchdog on the nation’s media is an important one that has a great deal of benefit to the public, and I enjoy seeing some of the most arrogant individuals in the nation’s fourth estate snarkily taken down a peg on occasion.

In addition, viewing Media Watch every week has obvious benefits for my own career. Viewed with an open mind, the show can act as a significant educational force for journalists like myself — showing us the boundaries of our often free-flowing ethics and highlighting others’ mistakes as signposts which should guide all of us in the media in our daily lives.

In short, I love nothing more than to settle into the couch with a hot chocolate on a Monday night each week and watch the show’s unsettlingly insightful host Jonathan Holmes tear shreds off the media industry in satisfying style. Its chilling tagline — ‘everyone loves it until they’re on it’ — and sardonic witticisms ring all of my bells, and I usually applaud its efforts. I await the day Media Watch chooses to attempt to tear Delimiter to shreds with keen anticipation.

However, this week I couldn’t help but feel that Mr Holmes and his team of researchers had gone too far when analysing coverage of one particular segment of the media sphere which, as a technology journalist, I am rather an expert in — over-hyped product launches by iconic gadget giant Apple.

Media Watch’s three minute segment on the Australian launch of the new iPad several weeks ago started off in standard territory — accusing the media of being too “compliant” in “eagerly dishing out free publicity” for every new launch of an Apple product. This, of course, has long been fair game for media analysts, and every technology journalist worth their salt is aware of the criticism that the media treats Apple differently than it does other companies.

But from that point on, as Media Watch showed clip after clip of the Australian media outlining the new iPad’s features outside various Apple stores teeming with avid wannabe new iPad owners, the program’s criticism of the issue descended into baseless accusations.

“Geeks,” Holmes pronounced, were “queuing up for no reason” to buy the new iPad. This factor, “combined with an all-too-eager media”, generated a “completely artificial story” about the new iPad’s launch in Australia.

In February, he pointed out, Samsung had launched a rival product which supported 4G speeds, “a genuine technical advance on what’s currently available”, whereas the nation’s current affairs programs had failed to inform Australian viewers that the new iPad wasn’t capable of the same. And when they did, they didn’t do it well enough. Holmes told his viewers: “Unlike Seven and Ten, the guest geeks on Nine and the ABC did eventually get around to the 4G issue – though it was no big deal, said [ZDNet.com.au reporter] Luke Hopewell.”

“So that’s all right. Go buy a new iPad.”

The ABC came in for particular criticism, due to a well-known clause in its editorial guidelines which stops the broadcaster’s journalists from mentioning product brands on air too much. “Why on earth,” Holmes wondered, “did ABC News Breakfast spend nine minutes in all on a bunch of tech-heads queuing outside a shop with a piece of fruit on it, to buy a marginally updated product that they could have got anywhere?” Written between the lines was Media Watch’s obviously self-aware attempt to adhere to those same guidelines itself.

The only problem with this is that from the perspective of someone who’s been covering Apple and technology products in general for a decade now, the overwhelming majority of the coverage which the Australian media generated around the launch of the new iPad locally — and certainly every clip Media Watch showed this week — was spot on the money; a fact which Media Watch did not appear to understand.

Almost all of Australia’s tech press correctly reported that the major new feature on the new iPad was the significantly enhanced resolution of its display, which genuinely represents something of a step change in touchscreen technology. This level of technology is simply not available from any other manufacturer and really enhances users’ experience of tablets in a way which has not been seen before.

In addition, while there is some interest in 4G mobile broadband speeds from early adopters, most of Australia’s more than a million iPad owners appear to be more than happy with their 3G speeds on their iPads so far. The new iPad does offer significantly enhanced network speeds in Australia over the previous iPad 2 due to, as Hopewell plainly noted, its dual-band HSDPA support, and I can’t see many people not buying a new iPad because of the lack of 4G support.

Recent research from IDC has even suggested that most Australians who are buying tablets are buying Wi-Fi only models — indicating that mobile broadband support is often not an issue at all. There will no doubt be some, but I cannot see a significant proportion of the market buying a Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 4G instead of an iPad (you see, I can happily mention product names, as Delimiter is part of what Holmes referred to as the “commercial” press) on the basis of its support for 4G speeds.

In fact, as analyst firm Telsyte has recently revealed, not many people are buying tablets that aren’t iPads at all.

In 2011, the company reported, Apple sold about one million iPads in Australia, representing around 76 percent of the total local market for the tablet category (and that’s a conservative estimate: I personally estimate Apple’s share as being much higher in Australia, and IDC agrees, estimating 84 percent). Other companies — Samsung, ASUS, Acer, Toshiba, Research in Motion, HP and others — took virtually no market share.

Why? Well, to put it bluntly, and I can, because Delimiter has reviewed almost every tablet available in Australia, the rival products are usually not that good. With the potential exception of one or two promising models, Delimiter’s reviews of tablets over the past year have shown that the iPad is the clear winner in the tablet category, by virtue of its feature set, software support, build quality and more. This makes sense, when you consider that the tablet category is one which Apple singlehandedly created several years ago. Everyone else is still playing catch-up.

In short, Media Watch’s complaint that technology journalists are focusing too much on Apple’s iPad really makes no sense, when you consider the fact that for Australia’s consumers, the word “tablet” basically equals “iPad”, in any practical sense. The ABC would be hard-pressed to avoid mentioning the iPad in its coverage of the tablet market. Why? Because the iPad basically is the tablet market. And the device is currently revolutionising everything from cabinet meetings to restaurant menus. It is more than a product; it represents a wave of techno-sociological change.

Media Watch’s other major criticism of the coverage — that it was silly to film queues outside Apple stores — also rings hollow.

As sociologists globally have made clear over the past few years, and as I have witnessed when I have personally interviewed consumers at half a dozen Apple queues over the past few years in Sydney, customers do not queue up outside Apple stores solely to be the first to buy the company’s new products when they launch. They do it because Apple has become something more than a gadget company, and its customers have signed on to something which is more akin to a social movement than a simple product buy. Apple is truly a company which has truly made a ‘dent in the universe’, and people line up to buy its products to support the realisation of that incredibly ambitious ideal, which has changed the world forever.

“The Apple lines have become a cultural phenomenon,” social psychologist Matt Wallaert told the Daily Mail in the UK several weeks ago. And the Guardian even reported a poll which said that a significant proportion of consumers reported they were queueing up because they were “die-hard Apple fans”, or “there to soak up the atmosphere”. That’s right — they care about Apple, the company and its products, and want to be part of a social movement.

It’s a completely legitimate idea to want to be part of such a movement, and in fact such movements are very common in the technology industry, which has a habit of changing people’s lives in revolutionary ways. Over the years sub-cultures have grown up around companies and platforms such as Apple, Windows, Linux, Android, broadband, video games and many others. Each is legitimate and useful for its time in its own way; in fact, important technological innovation is often directly spurred by such communities.

For Mr Holmes and his team to mock this as “geeks queuing up for no reason” belittles this sub-culture and is an example of exactly the kind of media stigmatism and stereotyping which Media Watch is normally so good at highlighting at other media outlets.

As the ABC’s head of continuous news Gavin Morris told Media Watch, in a response (PDF) which Media Watch chose not to broadcast on its program: “I do not disagree with the program team’s decision to cover the story. Any event which prompts people to camp in the street for days in anticipation has relevance to the audience and merits some coverage.”

I don’t disagree with Media Watch’s decision to examine and criticise the media’s coverage of the Australian launch of the new iPad. I hate hype around Apple products as much as the next man. But this segment didn’t deliver what I have come to expect from Mr Holmes and his team — insight and understanding of the issue which they’re reporting on. Perhaps next time Media Watch can actually dig under the surface rather than grasping at well-worn straws.

PS: One more thing, Media Watch: Now that I’ve got your attention, could you take a look at News Ltd’s coverage of the National Broadband Network debate? Here’s a good place to start. Or here. Or, you know, here. Or here. Australia’s frustrated technology sector would really appreciate that. Cheers!

Image credit: Still from the ABC’s Media Watch program, believed to be covered under fair use

Related posts:

1. Sydney Apple iPad queue is huge
2. Telstra hosts midnight iPad launch tonight
3. Telstra won’t sell the iPad — just iPad plans

opinion By participating in a series of highly secret, closed door negotiations with the Government and the content industry over the future of Internet piracy in Australia, national broadband provider iiNet risks losing its integrity and the trust of its customers that it will represent their best interests on the issue.

If you have followed the news in Australia’s telecommunications at all over the past few years, it should be obvious that very few of the organisations currently attempting to shape the future of online copyright infringement in Australia in secret, Government-sponsored meetings held over the past six months have much integrity to lose.

The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (and its shadowy network of sister organisations) represents a throng of content producers such as film and TV studios who refuse to make their content available in Australia in the timely and readily consumable fashion desired by their paying customers, yet have repeatedly engaged in legal action or quasi-legal threats against both Internet service providers and those very customers for trying to work around their antiquated distribution model. Plus, the group appears to be pretty much a front for the Motion Picture Association of America, which is known for the same behaviour internationally.

The Internet Industry Association — never a bastion of transparency — has distinguished itself over the past year by gifting the industry with an Internet filtering system which purports to block Australians from accessing child pornography online (itself a laudable aim), but in fact is trivial to circumvent and comes with inherent concerns around transparency, civil oversight and scope creep. Having done so, the organisation exited stage right and left the project in the hands of the Australian Federal Police, which will only discuss the issue when legally forced to by the Senate or by Freedom of Information request.

Telstra, of course, is a multi-headed hydra which tends to display differing degrees of ethical behaviour depending on who its current chief executive officer is (under David Thodey it’s been pretty good; under Sol Trujillo not so much) and which department you’re dealing with, but in general has a solid and well-recorded history of blocking competition in the telecommunications sector (South Brisbane, anyone?) and seeking to hold Australians in the past when it comes to new technology. Little brother Optus is a step up on the ethical scale, but isn’t exactly known for its transparency.

And of course there’s the kind-hearted host, the Attorney-General’s Department itself, which is perhaps best known to Australian technologists for concocting a wild scheme a year or so back which would have seen every email and telephone call in Australia tracked, in a giant database which would be accessible to law enforcement. Joy.

The Communications Alliance is one of the only organisations with a fairly clean record to attend the talks (perhaps because it was only formed a few years ago ago). However, the organisation didn’t disclose the fact that AGD was creating that database, despite knowing about it for some time — which begs the question of what else it wouldn’t disclose. It’s clear the group represents Australian telcos — not their customers.

Add to this heady mix the fact that all parties concerned continue to refuse to disclose any details — at all — regarding what was discussed over four lengthy meetings they have held on the issue of Internet piracy in Australia over the past six months (what information we do have has been dragged out of the department painstakingly by Freedom of Information requests) and you don’t have to be a cynical old journalist like yours truly in order to smell a conspiracy being hatched.

In this cadre of shady dealers known for keeping a backup ace or three in their shorts, national broadband provider iiNet is, to put it mildly, something of an oddity.

Led by a maverick entrepreneur passionate about bringing fast broadband to all Australians, iiNet is a company virtually defined by its steadfastly ethical and transparent operation. Its chief executive, Michael Malone, has openly and honestly answered questions from the press about the company and his views on the industry for several decades now, every time they have asked, and is a regular poster on platforms such as broadband forum Whirlpool and social network Twitter, where he is known for his forthright answers.

In an industry known for its shoddy customer service and disregard for user problems, iiNet’s customer service (in which we may include the call centres of subsidiaries Westnet and Internode) is renowned as stellar.

The company has continually, for two decades now, pushed strongly for positive technological change to benefit consumers, sequentially being at the forefront of launches in areas like ADSL, ADSL2 and ADSL2+, Internet telephony, value-added services such as game and file servers, self-service portals and more — and now it is attempting to drag the content industry into the new millennium through its promulgation of the FetchTV IPTV platform (which, for all its faults, is a decent effort).

And perhaps more than anything, iiNet is known for its defence of its customers in the multi-million-dollar lawsuit it is fighting against AFACT. All AFACT wants is for iiNet to take responsibility for the file-sharing habits of its customers; whereas all iiNet wants is for AFACT to respect the actual laws of the land in Australia and prove that they’re doing anything wrong, before it takes action. It sounds like common sense — but common sense rarely enters into the online copyright infringement debate — as we’ve previously chronicled, self-interest is more the norm.

With all this in mind, the question asks itself; Why the heck is iiNet having closed door discussions on the issue of Internet piracy with a group which includes its biggest competitors, organisations which are currently suing it, and a government agency which is known for concocting gargantuan conspiracies to monitor and control the Australian Internet? That’s exactly the question Whirlpool user DNAlchemist asked iiNet yesterday — or, to put it in his words: “Is this really a consultation, or are you just being asked whether or not you’d prefer lubricant?”

The answer came rapidly.

“Well, who is better qualified to listen to what rights holders want?” replied iiNet regulatory chief Steve Dalby. “We’ve probably given it more thought than any other ISP and understand the implications and flow-on issues (of any suggestion) as well, if not better than anyone.” He continued: “Businesses and governments conduct meetings every day of the week. It’s not usual for those meetings to be public. Given the width of the gap between the parties, I wouldn’t say any ‘agreement’ is imminent. Nevertheless, the answer is – yes, they’ll remain private – not that the existence of the discussions have ever been a secret.”

*cough* come again?

For Dalby to claim that these discussions have never been a secret is patently absurd. We only know that they exist because their existence was leaked to the media six months ago. Since then, I personally have been engaged in a dogged battle with the Attorney-General’s Department to get any information about them at all. We only found out yesterday that no less than four meetings (not two, as had been thought) had been held between September and February this year. Meetings which iiNet blithely attended, discussing matters of which the public knows nothing, but which will affect them dramatically.

As Delimiter chronicled yesterday, AGD has used a complex series of legal arguments to prevent almost all records of the meetings from reaching the public’s eye. It has applied the black marker to all notes taken by government workers at the meetings, the identities of those who attended, the agendas, any material handed out, and so on. This week it even claimed it had no record of who attended the February confab — despite the fact that the meeting was held just a month ago.

And yes, iiNet is qualified to discuss what AFACT and the rest of the content industry wants to happen on the issue of Internet piracy. It bloody well should be — after all, it’s been listening to AFACT drone on and on in first the Federal Court, and now the High Court, about what it wants for several years now. In fact, given the fact that AFACT itself tends to be fairly stupid as an organisation, I would say there’s a solid chance that iiNet now knows a lot more about what AFACT wants than AFACT does itself.

But what appears to have been left out of Dalby’s somewhat blithe response to this issue is a few … pesky questions about the ethics of what iiNet is doing right now.

Can you imagine the response of iiNet’s legal team, upon being told that iiNet was planning to sit down for coffee at Casa de AGD with AFACT, the very organisation which is currently suing iiNet in the High Court? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t something like: “Uh, sure, Steve — that sounds like a great idea. Pass the bagels.”

And given the derisive statements which senior government figures such as Communications Minister Stephen Conroy have already made about that same case, you can imagine the response of the sitting judges of the High Court, upon learning that the two combatants in a case which will set a substantial precedent in Australian intellectual property law, are sitting down every month or so for coffee and a chat, along with the department which is principally responsible for writing legislation in the space. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t something like: “Uh, sure, guys — you go ahead and discuss the issues. I’m sure there’s no chance to prejudice the case or to spur new legislation to override our High Court judgement.”

Personally, I am appalled that iiNet ever agreed to participate in these talks, given the blatantly obvious conflict of interest which they represent with regard to its High Court case against AFACT. I find it very hard to believe that the company has not received several stern pieces of advice on the matter from its legal counsel — advice which it then blithely ignored.

Every stakeholder in this issue — from AFACT to iiNet to other ISPs and the Government — acknowledges that the pending High Court decision in the #iitrial will have a dramatic impact on the online copyright infringement landscape in Australia. I can understand why the content owners and even the Government (which so often seems to play along to their tune a little too closely) is in favour of undercutting that decision with a series of concurrent discussions on the sidelines. But why does iiNet seem to feel the same way?

On a separate note, one has to wonder how iiNet’s customers feel about the issue.

iiNet has always taken the position that Internet piracy is not a legitimate activity, and it hasn’t ever explicitly defended the practices of its big-downloading customers in this area. On the face of it, the ISP’s High Court defence has transparently been about allocating responsibility for those illegal downloads where it belongs — on customers’ heads — rather than on iiNet’s head as a simple traffic intermediary. However, there is no doubt that in practice, the ISP’s high quota broadband plans at least enable Internet piracy, even if they don’t explicitly encourage it. And the ISP’s actions in forcing the burden of proof for allegations of Internet piracy back on content owners (rather than simply forwarding on infringement notices to its customers, as ISPs like Exetel do) have also had the practical effect of allowing its customers to feel ‘safe’ in their illicit BitTorrenting.

“We don’t talk about piracy” has been the unspoken agreement between iiNet and its customers, as the issue was swept under the industry radar. This approach has served the company — and many other Australian ISPs — well. Customers have been able to obtain the content they often can’t get otherwise in the format and timeframe they want, while ISPs have reaped the benefits of growing broadband consumption. And the whole deal has been positioned as the right approach to take to force the content owners to actually … make their products available for sale in a timely fashion and in a manner that consumers want to buy (rocket science, I know).

AFACT’s lawsuit threatened to throw a spanner in the works of this cozy relationship, but iiNet’s staunch — and so far, successful — defence in the Federal Court has reassured customers that the unspoken bond between them and their ISP was still intact. iiNet’s legal team would be the public face of their demand that the content owners pony up and make their content available legally, in a decent video format, through a platform like Apple’s iTunes — and at the same time as it’s available in countries such as the US. And, of course, iiNet’s customers would feel comfortable that their fairly high-priced broadband plans were paying for more than gigabytes — they were also supporting the right philosophical position.

By participating in the Government’s secret talks on the issue, however, iiNet is signalling to those same customers that its tacit understanding with them is in fact … null and void. In fact, did something so nebulous ever exist in the first place?

Now, to be honest, I’m not really that surprised.

As a company, iiNet is growing up. It’s grown so fast, and come so far, in fact, that it’s now becoming just another company — with the same multi-faceted, complex approach to issues, the same internal divisions which hamstring its operations, the same regulatory and financial constraints, and above all, the same self-interest in everything it does. Idealism very rarely survives in such highly capitalistic environments — and it never thrives. As we’ve seen in recent weeks with iiNet subsidiary Internode, even the staunchest and brightest of companies managed by steadfast individuals may falter in the transparency with which they conduct their operations. In fifty years, there may come a time when future journalists try and work out just when iiCorporate (or the iiBorg, as it is increasingly known) ever had a human face.

But that doesn’t make it right.

iiNet’s staunch defence in the AFACT trial saw the ISP painted as its customers’ white knight — standing upright in shining armour and yelling defiance at the unclean copyright hordes. It is unseemly — and disturbing — for that same bright figure to be skulking around the back corridors of the Attorney-General’s Department clasping sweaty palms with those same opponents — as well as the great broadband evil in the form of industry titan Telstra.

Australia’s telecommunications industry is already littered with characters of questionable integrity. I don’t want to see iiNet’s name added to that (growing) list.

Related posts:

1. Govt to continue secret anti-piracy talks
2. Secret piracy talks: Govt banned consumer groups
3. ISP: Secret anti-BitTorrent piracy talks failing

This blog post was authored by Mozart Palmer, a spokesperson for Pirate Party Australia. It was published in reaction to this article by AFACT executive director Neil Gane, which argues that the controversial SOPA/PIPA and ACTA anti-piracy laws being debated internationally have been been unfairly criticised.

opinion Copyright lobbyists love to use words like ‘stealing’ and ‘piracy’ to describe sharing copyrighted materials online. ‘Theft’ is another word commonly applied by these copyright protectionists to what is already a widespread practice. The expression ‘copyright theft’ is a paradox: it is impossible to take away a person’s right to copy information or ideas. ‘Theft’ is used to misinform the public, media and, most importantly, lawmakers, in order to outlaw what many see as perfectly normal behaviour.

We are taught from a very early age to share, and in the Information Age, where sharing information, ideas and culture is incredibly easy, it is only natural for people to continue to do so.

This ability is being hampered however, as groups such as the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT, whose name is ironically a paradox in itself) continue their efforts to protect the failing business models of an industry too complacent and comfortable to adapt. Whenever a new technology comes along that facilitates the dissemination of knowledge and culture on a much wider scale than before, the content industry – the copyright owners and their representatives – complain that it will destroy them.

The video cassette recorder (VCR) was famously condemned in 1982 by Jack Valenti, the then president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), who claimed that “the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.” Clearly the VCR did not kill the film industry. People did not suddenly stop paying for content. The industry adapted and moved on.

We are facing much the same scenario with the Internet. It is a tool that allows an egalitarian ‘information society.’ Access to content has never been easier or cheaper than now.

Yet this poses a dilemma for the content industry. Producers of content are forced to choose between fighting to maintain their old way of doing business or adapting to the ‘brave new world’ that the Internet is creating. Rather than be innovative and embrace the new technology, they seek stricter enforcement of the old ways of doing things.

What we are witnessing is an abject market failure. Consumers are forced to buy licenses to content that they have no real rights over, that are crippled with digital rights management (DRM) restrictions and are not easily accessible or conveniently delivered. When contrasted with the ‘pirate’ versions, where licenses are redundant, there is no DRM, and content can be accessed 24/7 on multiple devices, is it so hard to conclude why piracy is a popular way of accessing media?

Exorbitant losses are claimed as results of ‘piracy’ or ‘theft’ when litigating, without evidence as to whether those ‘pirates’ intended to purchase the content they accessed. Organisations such as the UK Intellectual Property Office express doubts regarding the methods of calculating ‘losses,’ offering the view that an item is only worth the value a consumer ascribes to it in the digital economy. Copyright holders must find a way of making their content valuable to the consumer – reasonable pricing and unfettered access might be good places to start.

Instead, they support the introduction of legislation that threatens the very civil liberties the Internet is capable of providing – to protect their copyrights they will gladly impinge upon our rights to freedom of speech and expression, not to mention the cultural rights enshrined in international law.

Neil Gane, the managing director of AFACT, is uninformed when he claims the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) would not go beyond preventing ‘large scale theft’. The wide provisions contained within SOPA and PIPA raise concerns regarding who is responsible for policing the Internet, and who has the authority to take down websites that are claimed to infringe copyright. There is also concern over false claims against competitive websites, as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has already been abused by rights holders.

Gane fails to address the concerns that the international public have about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). He ignores the fact that it does not delineate between commercial and non-commercial copyright infringement, which could allow for criminal liabilities to be taken against file-sharers.

He also ignores the grave concerns that the strict patent enforcement provided by ACTA would prevent medicines reaching those in developing countries who desperately need them. But as he is concerned with protecting the ability of content owners to empty our wallets in the developed world, perhaps it is unfair to expect him to think of those less fortunate. Regarding the claims that ACTA’s negotiations were transparent: anyone who believes that is deluded. Any transparency achieved was the result of leaks, and it is clear that only industry lobby groups received copies of the negotiating texts.

What the content industry fails to acknowledge above all is that it is cannibalising itself.

The Swiss Government have found that while file-sharing is popular in Switzerland, the budget these ‘pirates’ reserve for entertainment remains constant. People are simply supplementing their ‘cultural consumption’ with file-sharing because they do not have the money to purchase everything. Content is being created too fast for incomes to keep up, and copyright is lasting longer. At life + 70 years, the amount of content people are expected to purchase far outweighs their disposable incomes.

If the content industry and their representatives want to remain competitive, they must understand this, and adopt new business models that aren’t reliant upon squeezing every last dollar from us, but from offering reasonable, affordable and accessible services.

This article was originally posted on Mozart Palmer’s website and the Pirate Party Australia’s website and is replicated here with his permission. It has been licenced as Creative Commons.

Related posts:

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2. AFACT exposed: Insider investigator tells his story
3. AFACT wants ‘automated’ BitTorrent violation system