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   AJ Sadauskas (ajsadauskas@aus.social)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Jul-2023 19:09:53 JST AJ Sadauskas

   @stilgherrian @daedalus "People will tell you that pornography is one of the major reasons why there's been a high take-up rate [for broadband internet] in South Korea. I haven't confirmed that at first instance, but I've been there, I've looked at what's happening. My scepticism has really been about whether there is any compelling national interest in the Government spending money on subsidising roll-outs to consumers. Because at the moment it's pretty much more of the same but a bit faster for most consumers."

   — Senator Richard Alston

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     James Henstridge (jamesh@aus.social)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Jul-2023 19:28:44 JST James Henstridge

     in reply to

     @ajsadauskas @stilgherrian @daedalus And the broadband he was talking about as unnecessary back then would have been around 1 Mb/s.

     AJ Sadauskas repeated this.
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     AJ Sadauskas (ajsadauskas@aus.social)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Jul-2023 20:23:34 JST AJ Sadauskas

     in reply to

     • James Henstridge

     @jamesh @stilgherrian @daedalus There was a whole string of really boneheaded comms policy decisions under Keating and Alston that collectively cost the Australian economy billions.

     The original sin was opening up the telecommunications market to competition without structurally separating Telstra. So all the new telcos (Optus, AAPT, etc) were competing against Telstra, while at the same time utterly reliant on it for access to the copper phone network.

     Then came the duplicate cable TV rollout.

     In a sensible country, a structurally separated Telstra (with some federal funding) would have led the rollout of one national HFC network that covered most of the population. It would have delivered pay TV, phone calls, and later broadband. Most of the copper phone network would have been decommissioned some time around 1998. (It could have later been upgraded incrementally to HFC.)

     In Australia, the federal government decided (in an example of utter neoliberal stupidity) to allow Optus and Kerry Packer (Optus Vision) to roll out a HFC network literally down the same streets as a competing HFC Telstra and Murdoch (FoxTel).

     So some streets ended up with access to Optus HFC, Telstra HFC, and Telstra copper, while others (with poor quality copper lines or who that were too far from the exchange) ended up with no usable internet access at all.

     (And that's without getting into the whole Optus Vision ARL/FoxTel SuperLeague rugby league split fiasco!)

     And just to pour petrol on this policy dumpster fire, Alston decided to privatise Telstra without structurally separating it first.

     Good thing no-one was going to rely on this internet thing for anything more than smut and games, right?

     Right?