The Interweb Warrior

Wow what hypocrisy

2010-04-26T17:41:00.000-07:00

The SMH on Satuday carried an editorial (second part) titled Conroy tilts at a web windmill. It was better than most because it didn't misrepresent the intended scope of the web page blocking regime.

What it did do was open a new, novel reason for why the internet is different. In responding to Conroy's oft stated question of why Refused Classification content on the internet should be treated differently to other media the author offered;

He asks: what's so special about the internet? The answer is: nothing. But Conroy compares the internet with means of publishing - books, films - and assumes it should be subject to the same classification controls as they are. In fact it should be compared with free means of communication - speech, telephones, newspapers - which it more closely resembles, and in which governments intervene less because intervention is less likely to be effective.

This is either a more nuanced version of "why bother it won't be effective" or is really trying to argue the proposition that content published on a web page is really more like a conversation. Unfortunately, the author fails on the latter by asserting that newspapers are in there with speech and telephones rather than books and films. I have news for them - they would be committing an offence were they to attempt to publish refused classification material (indeed I suspect they would commit an offence were they to publish material that would be classified as R18+ or M18+). The fact is that newspapers, like television, run their own classification exercise rather than submitting it to the censor.

And that ultimately is all that is proposed for the internet. Not all sites will be rated by the "censor", only those referred. Just as the SMH would be referred if it published an instruction on euthanasia in its pages.

So ultimately the editorial rests on the assertion that it will not work. They cleverly then extend this to the "thin end of the wedge" argument that because it hasn't worked there will be pressure to extend it.

But here is another logical slip. The extension they argue will be needed will be to other ways of distributing the content. But the extension they fear will be the extension to more political content. How can it be that we should fear the extension to other content if the justification is that it failed in the first place.

If the SMH wants to join a campaign for free speech let them campaign against any RC list. But save us from this kind of second rate thoughts

The Pirate Party

2010-04-19T22:06:00.000-07:00

Computerworls has published the Pirate Party presentation to Exit International on how to bypass the Government's web-page blocking proposal. It gave us the chance to see that they are peddling the misinformation that equates the existing ACMA blacklisting process to the new one - despite Conroy's consultation on transparency and accountability for the new process.

How useful though is it to lecture these folks on how to bypass rather than doing the hard political yards to get information on how to take your own life taken off the Refused Classification list for all media. Surely that would be more useful to the audience.

Even more useful would be to be more than a single issue party and actually campaign to legalise euthanasia. That's the position the Democrats and its predecessor the Australia Party has had for at least forty years. The Democrats answer on the censorship issue is also saner - an end to Refused Classification in any media.

The Pirate Party - what a joke - just GetUp! in geeks T-shirts.

Openness and Transparency Submissions Released

2010-03-24T16:00:00.000-07:00

The quality of the discussion on the Government's policy in relation to controlling content available on the internet became apparent with the release of submissions on the framework for opennness and transparency.

Writing in the Punch Eliza Cussen (who is described as a GetUp campaigner) has identified what she called the top ten internet filter lies. I provided a comment online which is paraphrased here.

I only focus on what was called lie number 5. The point is conceded that the content designated by the policy cannot be lawfully sold or distributed in other forms. A distinction is then drawn between the distribution in those forms and the "filter" impeding "one-to-one" communication.

In reality the policy is not for a filter - it is more technically a policy of "web page blocking". That significantly changes both what it is and how it operates.

As an example the Government has satisfied itself that the high volume sites referred to have their own content management regimes that actually can be relied upon and provide an exemption from the blocking regime. Unfortunately the media beat up over Facebook the other day allowed this to be converted into a Conroy assertion that he would order it to be taken down and it would.

In fact the major high volume sites are promoting a voluntary campaign to achieve the same objectives.

One of the more terrifying submissions to the DBCDE inquiry on transparency was one from an academic who argued that the RC rules were too restrictive because they would block a Japanese cartoon form of child pornography, which is supposedly OK because it is legal in Japan. Thankfully this week's The Economist notes that the Japanese themselves are reviewing their own approach.

Most of the accusations of "lies" rely upon a misrepresentation of the policy.

The assault on Free to Air television

2010-02-17T14:38:00.000-08:00

The Murdoch press has come out with all guns blazing on the issue of licence fee rebates for the FTA networks.

ichael Stutchbury writing in the Oz labels it "corrupt" because it is a supposedly "scret" deal. The sin being that;

Neither the Prime Minister nor Conroy have revealed what the commercial broadcasters agreed to provide in return for paying less to use their publicly owned spectrum.

It really is a piece of nonsense framed like that. The broadcasters clearly made the point that they needed either a reduction in licence fees or a reduction in ocal content quotas. The Government chose the former. The fact there has been no writte commitment about local content related to the rebate could well be due to it being prohibited under the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement (the other FTA).

Meanwhile Terry McCrann has written a diatribe that shows he is more a tool of Murdoch propaganda than serious business journalists. He tries to claim that the only reason Rupert Murdoch doesn't own a Free to Air network is because he wasn't a media mogul whe the licences were handed out in the 1950s.

He forgets to mention that the only asset still held by its original owners is Nine Sydney and Melbourne, both of which were sold then bought back. He doesn't mention that Rupert used to own TV stations but had to dispose of them under the media cross ownership laws when he acquired HWT. He doesn't mention that News and Telstra each bought 15% staks in Seven when it was re-floated after receivership.

That party ended when Seven decided to join Optus and Nine in Pay TV anyway.

And Kerry Stokes is an even more recent media mogul than Rupert. He bought his entire stake in Seven on the open market. CanWest has been a ready seller over at TEN for some time. Rupert can't buy it for a whole host of reasons, but mostly because he doesn't really want to.

Meanwhile at Crikey, Bernard Keane repeats the line that the free to air networks were "given" 7 MHz of spectrum for the purposes of digital conversion. He qualifies this by saying they didn't have to "bid for it". The vast bulk of users of spectrum pay for it by administratively determined licence fees, not by auction.

The FTA networks pay for their spectrum in licence fees that are a progressive scale on revenue up to a rate of 9%. It might have been reasonable to think of the additional channels as additional licences - but they weren't. That actually means the networks pay more because they are paying 9% of the small revenues they get from the multi-channels rather than the lower rate the revenues would qualify for o their own. Issuing an additional licence would have raised less money not more.

The main users who have acquired spectrum through auctions ("bidding for it") are the mobile networks. Not all their spectrum was acquired that way - they pay a flat licence fee for the 900 MHz spectrum originally used for GSM. If you project mobile industry revenues forward at the same growth rate as today a licence fee of less than 3% of revenue would have raised the same amount as the fees raised by auction.

So let's just get the facts straight. The FTAs are paying for their (temporary) digital allocation and they are paying more for it than those people who did buy spectrum at auction.

Meanwhile Telstra and News pay nothing for their use of the airspace through which the Cable TV signal is distributed despite the attempts of some local councils to charge rates for it.

Intelligence Squared

2010-02-07T23:46:00.000-08:00

There is a suggestion that Intelligence Squared can't find speakers for the filter for their forthcoming debate on the incorrectly named internet filter. (Actually its against - cause the topic is Governments should not censor the internet.

Maybe they should invite Verity.

Regulation and the planned economy

2010-02-07T21:15:00.000-08:00

A very intemperate post from me on a very stupid article in New Zealand on competition and regulation.

This is a guy whose belief in "freedom" runs to his freedom to be exploited by monopolists.

I wrote in part;

When New Zealand was the global darling of economic turn around it wasn't from abandoning the law or regulation as such, but from introducing competition. New Zealand is allowing itself to "go soft" by listening to the bleating of its large firms.

There is no part of improving one's global competitiveness by reducing competition at home that can ever be justified. New Zealand might just be still getting away with it in dairy.

But riddle me this, if just one or two large firms, or even a cartel of firms provides global competitiveness, then a centrally planned economy is the way to go. With no local market competition you aren't getting the price system to do anything.

Letting domestic firms get fat dumb and happy on monopoly rents is no incentive to go compete.

Anonymous comments

2010-02-07T16:44:00.000-08:00

Verity is always thrilled to see her name in print, even if it is a very short comment on Crikey's website.

The comment was on the discussion about South Australian law that attempted to outlaw anonymous blog comments as part of political commentary. The new age internet types were horrified. However, there are two things we should look at. The first is how existing law works, and the second is about how anonymous comment can play out.

The first thing to note is that it is standard law across Australia that electoral comment has to be authorised by someone. We are used to the authorisation line on electronic and printed ads. We might forget though the additional line that appears to cover editorial content in newspapers as required by s328 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act. The Act also covers ads on the internet and misleading or deceptive publications.

Newspapers will normally include a line as to who is taken to be publisher of the paper for these purposes. That means that if the newspaper chooses to publish material that falls foul of the law the publisher is at fault. I find it fascinating that people on the web don't realise that the same rules apply, that ultimately the person who owns a domain name and thus authorises all the content that is available on their site is the "publisher".

How the anonymous content thing can play out is also interesting, mostly because it is open to manipulation. I think I started this blog soon after reading Ender's Game in which part of the plot is a brother and sister who created two fictional characters who get involved in debate on (I think) the interweb. The point is that they create an artificial conflict between themselves which they then resolve and bring both lots of supporters along with them.

The risk factor is that the speed of network formation and expansion using online media rather than the printed word or radio is that the "swarm" can develop before there is any nterrogation of its source.

Ultimately though the correct legislative solution is not a ban on anonymous content, just a recognition that the publisher (domain owner or as otherwise delegated) remains responsibl for the content.

Lundy and the filter

2010-01-14T15:07:00.000-08:00

Senator Lundy has blogged about her concerns with the "internet filtering" policy announced by her colleague Senator Conroy. She has followed up indicating (despite comments suggesting she wouldn't) that she has carefully reviewed the comments.

I can understand why Senator Lundy remains concerned by the policy, but the fact that it has been kept very tightly constrained to the RC content and to identified page addresses (i.e. it is not a filter it is a page blocker) means that it shouldn't be thought of as imposing a limit on the "freedom of the Internet".

More importantly though, if the Senator believes RC content should be available through the easy online navigation that is a webpage for adults who choose to "opt-in", why should the same content be denied to adults in other media.

The policy of refusing access to RC content is a child protection policy not because it aims to help prevent children (or others) from SEEING it, but to help protect children (and others) from being subject to the ACTIONS portrayed in the content.

Senator Lundy has resorted to concerns about the effect the page blocker will have on Internet speeds, and has picked up thoughts from contributors on limits of the technical trials. Be that as it may, it is still hard to argue that the Australian Government should take no action to prohibit distribution of material that it prohibits being distributed in other ways.

One thing I am being convinced of is that the current dividing line between X18+ and RC is set too low. That needs to be addressed, perhaps with another category above X18+ (dare I say XXX18+). But it needs to be addressed for ALL MEDIA.

Finally I was alerted to the Crikey story on the Lundy blog by a blogpost on a site that calls itself "Freedom to Differ".

Iwas alerted to it by my Google Alert on my name, because there is a comment there from a Verity Pravda that is not me. How awesome if there is now a "Not the real Verity Pravda" out there. More interestingly Freedom to Differ seems to thnk that it is OK on a blogpost to cut and paste an ENTIRE Crikey story. Freedom to steal as well perhaps?

A year is a long time

2009-12-15T20:02:00.000-08:00

I started this blog to discuss the Government's digital economy efforts. That blog got rapidy overwhelmed by anti-filter campaigners.

At the same time a year ago there was still much cynicism about the NBN, as tenders had just been recived and Telstra excluded from the process.

In April the Government changed the agenda on the NBN, and in July they released their DE report.

This month the Government held its Realising Our Broadband Future conference to build on the both of these - the Digital Economy future directions meets the NBN. An interesting fact is that despite the forum attracting lots of public participation, I think there were only three comments that linked filtering to the agenda. Which perhaps goes to show that manufactured outrage is not a sustainable position.

Reactions

2009-12-15T19:45:00.000-08:00

Meanwhile the reactions to the policy have been many.

Catherine Lumby writing in The Punch has trotted out some of the old stuff, based on misunderstanding the policy. In particular she tries a fear campaign that safe sex messages would be filtered out - as if there are any safe sex sites that would be Refused Classification.

She also raises the bogey about the control of the list. Conroy has commenced a public consultation on how to ensure the accountability and transparency of this list.

GetUp! (who admitted that their campaign against the filter was just designed to raise money) told the ABC that there is something wrong with a "public complaints" mechanism because that's what previously banned things like Catcher in the Rye. I keep being confused by this argument - because the web sites Conroy wants to block would be prohibited from import in any other form.

In the same interview EFA questioned the efficacy of the policy, as did Stilgherrian and Bernard Keane at Crikey. But they all miss the point that no legal prohibition is ever one hundred percent effective, but that is no reason not to try.

The worst I saw was David Braue at ZDNet who wrote an entire article that bore no relatio to the policy as announced, only to the prejudices of those who have tried to wrap themselves in a libertarian and freedom flag and have absolutely no idea what they are talking about.

Long time coming

2009-12-15T19:29:00.000-08:00

OK so I've been quiet a while. In the meantime Stephen Conroy has completed his "filtering" trials and come out with a policy.

He seems to have addressed all the myths and fear mongering on the topic.

Most importantly the technical report showed that filtering a defined short list of adresses (URLs) can be achieved reasonably accurately without serious impact on network performance. On the subject of what to exclude he has announced that it will be limited to Refused Classification material, that is, imported online content will be subject to the same restrictions as imported content on paper or a disc. This is not creeping censorship, it is making the same rules apply everywhere.

The list is therefore not the same as the infamous ACMA "black list". It will be constructed using public complaints and international co-operation to identify the most egregious sites. What's more he has listened to concens about secret censorship and proposed a process of public scrutiny of the list.

Finally he has heard the concerns about the absence of an R18+ category for games and has commenced a process to seek to introduce that classification, and at the same time has stated that these games will be not included on the list of refused classification sites to be blocked.

In addition to the mandated filtering he has recognised that there are end-users who don't feel confidant in their ability to maintain their own filters. He will introduce a program to assist ISPs in offering an opt-in network based filter that goes beyond the mandated filter.

This looks like a sensible policy that goes no further than tries to apply the same rules to web content a are applied to other content. It is a policy based on testing of solutions and with appropriate puiblic safeguards. It is a policy that makes the fear-mongers in the internet community look somewhat foolish. As an example, how much of the discussion was about the blacklist and how it was constructed even after Conroy made it clear the policy would only apply to RC?

Will it work? Yes and no. It will stop people accessing certain sites through simple web browsing. It will not stop the the internet being used to "import" refused classification material. It is a proportionate response.

Do gun control laws stop death by gunshot? No, but they do severely limit it and make Australia a safer place.

Acknowledgement should be made of the contributions of Telstra, Optus, Primus and iiNet in working with the Government in developing this scheme. This is a refreshing change from an industry normally best noted for taking no responsibility for its products and making assumptions about the abilities of customers that are not conected to reality.

Up there with Ireland

2009-07-27T01:03:00.000-07:00

So reland has now published their Digital Economy report. Well actually it is "the first report in the Knowledge Society Strategy process".

They have a six point plan. But theirs starts with choosing to build an exemplar network with Irish technology called "Optical Burst Packet Switching".

It has a few more targets and more projects - but is otherwise much the same as ours - all content centres and smart grids. Ho Hum. Read all about it.

It is here at last

2009-07-14T06:51:00.000-07:00

I started this blog way back in December by welcoming the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy to the blogsphere. Tonight (until dawn) the Minister launched the report that the blog fed into.

I guess the report will get tossed around a lot. There will be some like Stuart Corner that will be disappointed that it didn't read like a business plan - with clearly stated goals, measurement processes and neat strategies for its implementation. But in the end those kinds of reports aren't much use either.

As was noted in the introductory chapters of the Glasson report Government has a limited array of activities it can pursue. These include legislation, taxation, incentive payments or investments. The only other toool they have is to "define the conversation". In a more lyrical moment I might talk more about the importance of that, and how in the real world real decision makers are very much "boundedly rational". The significance of framing the conversation is that you can direct the conversation.

The final report has done a wonderful job of providing some structure to that framing discussion. It has created a degree of vision about what the Digital Economy entails, carvd out roles for Government, Industry and the Community, and talked a bit about how progress will be measured. For each of the three sectors three "elements of a successful digital economy" have been outlined.

These are;
Government: lays the foundations for digital infrastructure
Government: facilitates innovation
Government: sets conducive regulatory frameworks
Industry: demonstrates digital confidence and builds digital skills
Industry: adopts smarter technology for environmental sustainability
Industry: develops sustainable online content models
Community: enjoys digital confidence and digital media literacy
Community: experiences inclusive digital participation
Community: benefits through online engagement

These are really valuable structures to frame the discussion. It is particularly valuable that the term "industry" refers to all productive sectors of the economy not just the ICT industry. It is also useful to note how the three sectors of government-industry-community are described as inter-relating.

It is perhaps a pity that what has been forced into the frame is much the same discussion as was in the original consultation paper and that between them all the individuals and groups who submitted weren't able to shake some new ideas loose.

I imagine there will be more critics than just Stuart. It perhaps isn't as sexy as Digital Britain, it couldn't copy the simple "four Cs" model from New Zealand (confidence, connnectivity, capability, content - I think).

The success of the Directions Paper will be measured by how much the framework can be used for framing discussion. That is something that can only be judged in time.

Merciless rip-off

2009-06-30T16:20:00.000-07:00

As this is meant to be a digital economy site I thought I might rip off an item from Plum Solutions that provides a really interesting example of just how useful the web has become for developing human knowledge.

What they were providing was a list of online resources to assist people using Excel for financial modelling. Spreadsheets some may now were the original "killer ap" for the PC, with VisiCalc for the AppleII and the original Lotus 1-2-3 for the initial IBM platform. While they have come a long way from there the advances have mostly been in formatting options and built in formulae. But the biggest single change has been their ability to handle larger quantities of data.

The suggestions from Plum were;
* The LinkedIn Financial Modelling in Excel group. The LinkedIn groups in general are a good way to access people interested in your field. Knowledge Management professionals will talk a lot about creating virtual groups of experts across an organisation. LinkedIn shows how to do it across the globe. Interesting question - do the really large knowledge based organisations like the consulting firms run their own social networking sites. I know that at least one Government Department (actually DBCDE) tried to do so but it didn't seem to get much use.
* Pointy Haired Dilbert is a fascinating blog for the heavy-duty Excel user. Plum suggest that if you subscribe, barely a day goes by without a fascinating tip or Excel tidbit.
* Accotding to Plum www.financialmodelingguide.com and the related www.finance30.com have a huge following and are great resources on general finance as well as Financial Modelling. These are very much focussed on the "finance" part of financial modelling.
* Plum refers to the discussion forum on Financial Mechanics site as "the entertaining Swamp Fox" newsletter and user forum. Possibly interesting stuff, again very much for the financial.
* Meanwhile Vertex 24 is described as a guide to Excel in everything and includes loads of templates and calculators.
* Corality is an interesting firm that specialises in the audit of models. They provide a blog that Plum claims "has lots of Financial Modelling and Excel-related topics".
* Others suggested by Plum are Navigator Project Finance which has a blog together with free tutorials and other resources to download, and Access Analytic which has a "knowledge area".
Plum concludes by noting that for plain Excel stuff, you can always head straight to the Microsoft user discussion groups

Plum readers also offered other useful links. Mohit Khurana provided a link to his own ExcelMatic blog. Another reader promoted speadsheetzon.com which describes itself as "one of the biggest Excel template repositories on the web".

The purpose of this post wasn't just to mercilessly ripoff the Plum post nor just to make abn interesting repository of these links for leter use - it was to show off just how much the web increases the accessiblity of this kind of knowledge.

My only disappointment...none of the links seemed to refer to the Mathematica kernel for Excel, and they were all financial modelling biased (the place spreadsheets made their own). I'm more interested in the statistical/econometric capabilities, and in the possibility of using Excel as a platform for conducting agent-based modelling (why - because CELLS look like natural homes for parameters for agents (which could be rows) - new sheets for each new time period - and lots of mathematical functions are available).

Long Time No Talk

2009-06-29T23:11:00.000-07:00

I got an e-mail advice on 25 May that read

The third installment in the government's online consultation trial has just launched (with much less publicity) Please check it out at www.openforum.com.au/NHROC I would be happy to talk to you about it. Really want to let as many people as possible know it's happening so they can participate.

I sort of missed it though as I had temporarily retired battered and bruised from the public policy debate space.

I was intrigued by how this was called the "third installment" - I guess the DE blog was the second as someone else had run one as well. But I have serious doubts about the validity of this one, as the choice was made to use space on www.openforum.co.au which counts as its major sponsor a group called Global Access Partners. GAP gives the illusion of being a straight-forward private think tank, but their modus operandi was pretty is very non-transparent.

More recently the Australian Government has launched a consultation on Government 2.0 using the tools. I'm starting to think they are trying too hard to find ways of doing it differently rather than simply being organic in the development of use. After all the move to publishing decision from the Government Gazette to websites has been gradual.

The big focus on Public Sector Information has nothing really to do with any of the digital economy issues - the traps in this space seem mostly to be caught in odd thoughts about Government not competing with the private sector. That is, by being in the info biz they cut off someone else's opportunity to make a buck.

The relative logic of that proposition kicks off a strand of discussion in economics I don't want to pursue.

PS Tried another post to Crikey about filtering. Let's see if they will publish me again.

Secrecy and the Digital Economy

2009-04-30T22:00:00.000-07:00

It was with some fascination that I noted that the Digital Economy blog and subsequent discussion paper included a section on private sector use of Government information. I realised it appeared there because of the particular interest of one advisor to Minister Conroy who has subsequently moved on to the office of the Premier of Victoria.

It has been one of the notable achievements of the Rudd Government that at least Senator Faulkner has been able to progress on a range of issues to do with openness in Government. This has included both FOI Reform and the lobbying code of conduct. However, I am aware through a family connection that Senator Faulkner is finding the process slow and and the support of his colleagues lacking.

But it remains the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy that sets the benchmarks for opacity. One of the more bizarre is their ongoing inability to understand the lobbying code, most recently demonstrated by a claim in a call for sbmissions that submissions by lobbyists would need to comply with the code. The problem is the code actually notes that submissions made in response to requests for submissions is not a lobbying activity.

They also suffer from an ongoing inablity to release submissions to discussion papers at or about the time of submission. The most recent ase is that of the Digital Economy consultation itself. It appears their excuse (from talking to a colleague) is that they forgot to ask at the time if submissions could be published and are only just getting around to that task now.

A related problem is the idea that consultants reports on policy issues are automatically tagged as "advice to the Minister" and hence never allowed to see the light of day. This usually results in repeated consultations covering the same turf.

Thankfully the related agency ACMA only suffers from its interpretations of the lobbying code of conduct. It has a new policy of including an agency response to submissions (that is, active demonstration of the concept of consultation by demonstrating that the views were considered even if not adopted) at the same time as final papers are released.

I would prefer they focus on transparency of the policy process before they worry about access to Government data.

Australia goes ballistic

2009-04-08T01:06:00.000-07:00

From the little broadband backwater Australia has <announced its own plans to go ballistic on broadband. I guess this will make tickets to the FTTH Council in Melbourne in May the hot item of the month.

But its been really hard to work out what's going on. The announcement include a summary from the Expert Panel evaluation which said that no proposals met the criteria but a path forward could be found with a mix and match from various proposals.

The price tag of $43B is just a projection from these elements to deliver Fibre to the Home to 90% of the population at 100Mbps, and 12Mbps to the remainder through satellite and next generation wireless. But outside of Tasmania we have no idea who the providers will be nor how they will be chosen.

Because the Tasmanian fibre is only offering 100Mbps one can safely assume that is GPON. Bad news is that GPON suffers the same "not future proof" characteristics as FttN. It also doesn't really come with an estalished competition model for innovation.

The wireless component is unspecified technology in unspecified spectrum. In Australia right now the only available technology is WiMAX and the only spectrum owners weren't bidders.

As for the satellite component to deliver 12Mbps to the 2-6% of the population that might be serviced that may require one or two more satellites than are currently planned.

Plenty of opportunity. The big loser remains the incumbent telco elstra - especialy as the accompanying regulatory review foreshadows that their second and third strategies after FttN (use their pay TV infrastructure or wireless) may be barred to them through forced divestiture of the Pay TV business and the capping of future spectrum.

As Benoit Felton says;

Overall, both of these announcements, much as they may be frought with risk, are momentous because they dare to break the current paradigm that was inherited from the (largely botched) telco liberalisation back in the 80s-90s. It's hard to anticipate how either will play out simply because for a large part we are now in unknown territory.

Crikey by-play

2009-03-23T21:18:00.000-07:00

Stilgherrian has been busy over at Crikey again today and yesterday. I'm not going to bother linking to him.

In yesterday's Crikey I had comments published. But in response to the extra I made a contribution which has not yet been published, which reads;

Oh dear. Those anti-filter types just can't seem to follow the story long enough to get anything right. Re: Razer: Conroy should not be surprised at blacklist leak, the good Helen has tried to infer something from the list of six providers announced already as participating in the trial, claiming "Sadly, applicants Optus and iiNet are still waiting. For the first round, Conroy has selected some odd companies." This isn't something being decided in "rounds" as the Minister has explained (at ATUG) there are sixteen applicants and some had simpler applications to process than others. Some ISPs have tried to use the trial as a way to fund equipment upgrades, which, understandably, isn't the Minister's intent.

Meanwhile Stilgherrian should have waited till he'd seen my comment before rushing to print. Wikileaks doesn't have another leak they are just describing how they got the list - and - horror of horrors it had nothing to do with the ALP or the filter trial. It was a copy of the list generated under the legislation and distributed in accordance with the industry code. So nothing in the filter trial was relevant to the list leaking, except the campaign. Most importantly the process supposedly favoured by the industry (end user control, filtering software) was exposed for the inadequate process it is.

And there is an attempt to claim that because a site referred to ACMA after August was on the list that the list must be more recent than its date. This conveniently ignores the fact that the list contained URLs not on the ACMA list, so it could have been there from another source, and also that the anti-filter campaigner reporting the URL has no way of knowing if the URL was already on the list before complaining about it.

Finally, if the Minister has made inconsistent statements about what content the final filter will limit (the existing prohibited list or the narrower Refused Classification) I'm prepared to believe his most recent comments, or at least wait till I see what is in the final legislation

Mark Newton got a reply in today's comments and Stilgherrian had yet another go.

I've submitted my contribution;

Mark Newton (comments) incorrectly states that I suggest the IIA was involved in the leak of the ACMA list. But he does agree the list was leaked from the existing process and the existing legislation - which is the framework the IIA supports. He asks how long the list for the ISP filter would take to leak, and the answer, as I wrote, is that it doesn't matter - as with a filter in place the average joe-blow at home isn't going to be accessing the sites.

I think the issue about whether the list released is or isn't the "ACMA" list is a little weird. Even the first list seemed likely to at least include the ACMA list. But, to repeat, the leak came from a nine-year-old process of distributing the list to filter providers who embedded it in software for furher distribution. Can we all agree that that is a dumb idea? And, by the way, if we plan the filter right we only need to install it on the transit links out of the country rather than in every ISP - that is a lot more efficient and a lot more controlled.

And it really does become possible to institute a process for review of the sites listed on the list. Finally it is strange that Stilgherrian can be dredging up the "Conroy s Big Brother" line (which is matched in the chat forums with claims that the Rudd government is totalitarian) in the ame Crikey issue as John Faulkner's review of FOI laws is reported.

If I was the editor I probably would't bother because I'm not saying anything new ... but then again, neither is Stilgherrian or his colleagues.

To confuse things

2009-03-23T19:09:00.000-07:00

Let's talk about democracy.

You might have seen an item by Michael Duffy in he SMH on the weekend. Duffy discusses the claim that "the internet has healthily diluted the political power that used to be concentrated in the hands of those who were older, wealthier, and better connected than the average citizen." He relies upon a book by Matthew Hindman called The Myth of Digital Democracy to claim that the internet has in general made little impact.

The central thesis is that who speaks, and who gets heard is still fundamentally the same. For example, while GetUp! might reach a big audience, so did street stalls with paper petitions. People like me who blog were also letter writers to newspapers. People who talk a lot about politics in chat or twitter do it a lot in the pub.

The thesis has some merit - however, it is not quite as simple as that. True the same people are still mostly doing the same things just in different ways. But significantly the internet means that a individual is no longer denied a voice. The impact is at the margins rather than a fundamental reform. And it is all too easy to forget how in earlier generations the printing press was the most significant weapon of revolutionaries. Simon Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin is full of the stories of the moving, defending and loss of printing presses.

You don't notice the benefits of the internet in democracies as you do in states that aren't democracies.

This is all a long intro to segue to the fact that I've been included in an online list of the censorship who's who. I'm sure the Crikey guys would be thrilled to see that I'm referred to as having contributed i the main stream media because I have written in Crikey - they don't think of themselves as MSM.

Anyhow the site also has a who's who on a Bill of Rights. Just to confuse matters I'm absolutely supportive of a Bill of Rights. I'm ultimately supportive of a Bill of Rights that would be incorporated in the Commonwealth Constitution, but I can see all the dilemmas that poses.

What I can't stand is all the opposition to a Bill of Rights as just an Act of Parliament. Lots of very idiotic comments running around about either over-empowering judges to "make law" (or at least overturn law) or about constitutional problems if courts lower than the High Court were empowered to make decisions about the constitutionality of laws.

It really is possible to hasten slowly. Step one would be to pass an Act establishing Basic Human Rights in Australia. In that Act you authorise a statutory body (e.g. HREOC) to report annually to Parliament on whether any rights have been affected by legislation, and empowering them to conduct enquiries and receive complaints. Parliament doesn't have to do anything - but the process holds the Parliament and Government to account to voters for the contraventions. (You can expect they will react by varying one or other Act).

Once we all get comfortable with that you change the Act so that the High Court can decide if a new piece of legislation offends the Act, and specify that the latter Act is void if it is not re-enacted by the Parliament within three months (or twenty sitting days) of the Court's decision. Once again Parliament might decide to amend the Rights Act.

Once that becmes stable you put the referendum to adopt the final Act as a set of Constitutional rights.

Not hard really. And I suspect that the filter would be legal under any of them.

Oh Lord Oh Lord

2009-03-22T23:20:00.000-07:00

Here we go, the filter issue is getting out of hand. Apart from Stigherrian and Helen Razr getting another run in Crikey, there have been three high-brow pieces.

The first is ABC radio Background Briefing which, quite frankly, was standard beat up 101. Drawing wrong conclusions about who the first six triallists were, pointing out that there are other ways to access child pornography. The idea that the filter is "filtering" all web-traffic rather than simply blocking access o certain sites.

The second is New Matilda which also runs most of the same lines.

Meanwhile at Online Opinion there is a wacky piece which provides a really good scenario of how someone registering a new site could be acquiring a name that has already been blocked. But he spoils it all by claiming that a person who linked to the site would already be in court defending a fine rather than having become aware of the fact the site was on the list. But the supposed solution was about not just URL blocking but actually de-registering domains. That could be far more disastrous.

Pity that with all this attention no one else seems to pose the two step question. Is it appropriate to run classification systems at all? If so, how should it be done on the Internet?

Filtering - again

2009-03-18T20:28:00.000-07:00

I promise this is not my obsession, but I am getting increasingly frustrated by the nonsense that is the campaign against Internet filtering. I'm inspired to write by the leaking of the "ACMA blacklist" to Wikileaks.* It is interesting to note that according to the Minister this is NOT the ACMA list.

The difficulties I have with the campaign are many, but the main ones are that it is not a genuine libertarian cause, that it is mostly self-defeating and that it is based on the opponents own constructed straw-man. Let me deal with the first two, and then fill the void created by the absence of clear policy from the Government.

Not libertarian
The campaign against the filter is not a genuine libertarian campaign because, in fact, nowhere do they make the argument that the information that the Government ostensibly claims is to be filtered - images of child pornography and abuse - is information that should be frely available.

Earlier libertarian campaigns that did lead to radical changes in Australia's approach to censorship focussed entirely on the right of citizens to access he material subject of the campaign. The campaign about the censorship of The Little Red Schoolbook was a classic example of focussing on specific content. Similarly the work of Wendy Bacon and others expressly focussed on sexual politics, but this was based on some philosophical foundations. The ultimate was, of course, the simple absurdity of the book censorship rules that banned books like Portnoy's Complaint and Lady Chatterly's Lover. It was the revision of these rules that made Don Chipp a poster boy of "small l" liberalism.

A similar campaign now would be about the stringency of the rules that deems certain material "refused classification" and hence not legally able to be distributed or sold in Australia. But this is not the campaign - the campaign is that somehow the Internet is precious and different.

A slightly different variant of the libertarian strand of argument is that somehow the creation of the ability to filter Internet content merely by the device of a secret blacklist would empower the executive government with the ability to filter out other material, such as political material. The whacky case of the gruesome abortion images was supposedly demonstrating the possibility of this. Other comments, notably on the DE blog (now torn down I gather), went to the idea that this Parliament shouldn't provide the tools to another Parliament to implement.

This is all slightly crazy. Firstly you don't need this Parliament to make things possible for a future rogue Parliament, they can do it themselves. Secondly, the list is maintained by a statutory authority not subject to direction on including specific sites. Conspiracy theorists might abound, but you'd need to involve a lot of people in the conspiracy.

The campaign against the filter is not a genuine libertarian campaign.

A self-defeating campaign
Jonathan Zittrain, in his book The Future of the Internet; and how to stop it refers to the wonders of the Internet being the fact it is a generative technology. He writes;

Generativity is a system's capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.

His thesis is that generativity is the Internet's greatest strength and its greatest weakness, it is this generativity that turns the Internet into a superb means for conducting scams, for phishing and, indeed, to subvert ordinary agreed social rules that are enacted as laws. This ongoing trend makes users sufficiently nervous about the net that they want it "controlled", and control ultimately means "locked down". There would be nothing simpler for controlling the net than going bck to the idea that all networks are Government owned and controlled just the way telephone networks were until the early 1980s.

The campaign about the filter only serves to drive home more to the non-technologists just how much this fear is justified. It does nothing to make the average user feel more comfortable to be told that a Government program to "protect the children" is ineffective because people can just work around it. That's like telling people that there is no point in a law prohibiting murder because people will still get killed. It doesn't instil confidence - it just inspires people to say "do more" - in the case of murder more is banning guns and increasing police forces. In the case of the internet, nationalising it is one safe way to go.

But more specifically the recent event has been the publishing of the ACMA "blacklist". Now this is the list prepared to notify filter providers of the sites that ACMA has identified that under Schedule 5 of the Broadcasting Services Act. It is notable that the list that has ben "leaked" in March 2009 is the one issued in August 2008 - speedy stuff.

It is also notable that this list has been in existence since the original amendment was passed in 1999. Why has the list been made public now - because it suits the purposes of those campaigning. There were lots of comments about how the list would become public, but it only has become public because of the campaign. How exactly does that endear the campaign to anybody? Especially since it also appears that the document is not the ACMA list.

Finally and most damagingly for the anti-filtering campaign, the publication of the list has less effect if the filter is in place! We will talk more about the ability to subvert the filter - but do I really care if the list of sites you can't get to is known?

I really do not know what campaign these people are pursuing, but it doesn't seem to be logical. Of course, they try to take comfort from the idea that the Government won't get its legislation through the Senate. Hello. Has anyone noticed that the existing law was introduced by the coalition when they were in Government. Do they really think that the coalition are the group that are going to vote for child porn?

A better strawman
In the absence of the Government doing it, let's write a possible policy.

The concept of classification of content is now well established in Australia. The most well understood regime is provided by the Classification Act that, as we know from the cinema ads, helps us make informed choices. The essential concept is that it helps a person to know before they (and importantly pay to) watch or buy something that it meets the standard they would expect. So the primary purpose is informing people about the content. A secondary purpose is to impose some mandatory restrictions, specifically on where and how R18+ and X18+ material may be displayed. In addition it allows for certain material to be "refused classification", this is material that cannot be distributed or sold, but it is not illegal to own. Included in this is a tighter level of material covered by other legislation - specifically the "illegal" material of child pornography, this is material that it is illegal to have in your possession.

This regime is all compounded by the fact that aspects of it are in State law, for example, whether X18+ material can be sold. Similarly the classification scheme itself was subject to an agreement between he States and Commonwealth, and the fact that there is no R18+ category for games is because of the inability to get this agreement, not unwillingness on the part of the Australian Government. (The absence of this classification evidently is a reason to object to the banning of online RC material - as opposed to being a reason to get the category created).

Let's also look at the limitations of the content classification scheme. Refusing something a classification and making it not available for distribution in Australia will not prohibit someone from accessing that material. It might be brought in undetected in luggage or even in the mail. However, the fact that it might still be accessed is never given as a reason for not having the classification and the prohibition.

This is not the only process. Recognising the more dynamic nature of television the TV networks operate their own classification scheme within the TV code of practice.

In the best of all possible worlds a similar classification scheme could operate for the entire web content on the Internet. For simple browsing all that would be required is that as part of the DNS scheme every domain had a classification. Just as TV that classification could be self-attested by the domain owner. Where the domain facilitates other contributions, e.g. blogspot that hosts this blog, whirlpool which is a forum, it is up to the domain owner how they police the need for all content to met the classification standard. The ability to execute a take-down notice of some kind would suffice. A variation on this is the approach taken by the Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA).

Unfortunately due to a range of factors, including the fact that different countries still have different standards, the full implementation of a satisfactory online classification scheme is some way off.

So absent a global solution, how can we replicate the outcome of a classification scheme (noting that if you want to make the libertarian argument against classification that should be a technology independent argument). The coalition tried to do it through the device of the existing BSA provisions. This defined certain content as prohibited. Prohibited content was to not be hosted in Australia, and through an industry code, the industry agreed to restrict access to the content that was hosted outside Australia. That latter restriction is by the provision of the list of prohibited content to filter providers and the promotion by ISPs of those filter providers to their customers.

This legislation unfortunately defined prohibited content as being R18+, X18+, and RC material. The procedure is that content is currently only listed if a complaint is made to ACMA and ACMA has investigated the site, classified the material in one of the categories and identified the site is hosted overseas. The ALP policy did include a plan to be more active on the list construction in conjunction with the filter. In addition ALP policy planned to require all ISPs to offer an optional "clean feed", that is of a filtered service more restrictive than the prohibited content.

What Conroy has never clearly stated is that it is his intention to modify the BSA so that there are two classes of content. The RC material that must be filtered out, and then the R18+ and X18+ that would be filtered out if a customer elected to acquire a clean feed.

The only objections to this (that are not objections to classification in general) are that it will "slow the internet", that it won't actually stop access to the bad stuff and that it is subject to abuse as the list is secret.

Slow the internet
Say the word "filter" and people immediately assume dynamic filtering or "deep packet inspection". In reality the simplest implementation of a filter of designated URLs (parts of sites) is to map those URLs to the IP addresses of the machines that host them. It is this list of IP addresses that is provided to ISPs and they route traffic to those IP addresses to the filter provider who undertakes the further analysis. This is cheap, scalable and efficient. It adds zero latency to IP addresses not on the list, and ideally can be implemented as part of the transit provision service out of the country and not need to occur in ISPs.

It won't stop access
This is the weakest argument, because it is equally true of all attempts to prohibit anything. As mentioned above you can find ways to get access to RC films or pictures. But is that a reason not to try? Is that sufficient reason to say they can be sold in any newsagent in the country? It is also the argument of the tech savvy who don't understand that the vast bulk of internet users never get past just typing URLs into browsers.

Secrecy of the list
The more effective the filter, the less necessary it is to keep the list secret. The list of films refused classification is public. It is no use in Australia because you can't buy them, though you could use it to try to source one through the means we know. Similarly the list of banned sites isn't much use to you if the filter is in place (except that you may equally use it to subvert). As a layer between secrecy and full disclosure the list could be made available for interrogation by application - so that civil libertarians and others could check to ensure the guidelines are being pursued.

Concluding remarks
The campaign against the filter is, quite frankly, stupid. It is only succeeding because Conroy hasn't been prepared to convert more of the campaign promise into policy documents. A good old fashioned "green paper" to accompany the trial would have been a good start.

Meanwhile others keep making gooses of themselves. The IIA is most concerned about the idea of legislation and would prefer to deliver whatever Conroy wants by way of a revision to the industry code. Conroy himself in answering a question at the recent ATUG conference is reported to have gone on at some length with the idea that the filter can't be undemocratic because it was the Parliament that will introduce it.

That hasn't stopped the Greens' Scott Ludlum engaging in a bit of posturing that he and other Senators will stop the legislation but they are still afraid the Government might try non-legislative routes.

It would be all much simpler if we divided the discussion into its two simple parts. What classification and content restriction schemes are appropriate for all content, and how can we mot readily put that into effect for content delivered over the Internet.

* I'm led to believe that providing a hyperlink on my site to the site that provides the list technically is a breach of the rules about publishing the list. If I am so notified I will remove the link.

Cynicocratical

2009-03-18T18:51:00.000-07:00

There you go, a new word for you. What does it mean? "Pertaining to rule by cynics".

Use the word in context - judging by the commentary about internet filtering in Crikey and other supposedly reputed sources, the governance of the internet is cynicocratical. That is the possible subject for a blog post all on its own!

However this blog post is actually about words - in fact two kinds of words - firstly words that are in danger of extinction and secondly words being created. There are two ripper websites devoted to each topic - each of which can send you a "word of the day" (and both shown to me by the same work colleague).

Save The Words is a cool flash site that provides a picture of a lot of words that are in danger of falling into disuse. Moving the cursor moves the frame across the virtual picture and the words asked to be picked. You learn the meanings of the words, can adopt words and order a t-shirt of the word. The site is operated by the Malaysian subsidiary of OUP (and unfortunately the t-shirts are only available in Malaysia and Singapore).

Meanwhile Urban Dictionary describes itself as the "slang dictionary you wrote". Hence it technically could be called a Wiki-ictionary devoted to slang. While much of it is interpretive of existing slang, it is also a place you can go to make up a word. The word of the day today was "cewebrity" which means "an internet personality that has achieved celebrity". On that basis one of the afore-mentioned - the identity known as "the fake Stephen Conroy" - is a cewebrity.

I've signed up for both. I'll resist the temptation to try to include both words in a blog posting each day!

Slow response time

2009-03-15T21:29:00.000-07:00

I have received a late comment on one of my earlier posts about the filtering issue by websinthe.

I really get irked by people who object to my ocassional typo (more often typos than spelling errors). He wants me to use Firefox as my browser because it has an inbuilt spell checker - but then again I could always compose in a wordprocessor and cut and paste.

I object even more to people who use the gratuitous sign-off that implies the whole piece fails on grammar, logic and research.

Now to the substance. Apparently my comment that certain concepts on which capitalism is founded weren't self-created was both insulting and wrong. Firstly when I claim "an argument ignores X" I am not actually claiming "the person who is making this argument is ignorant of X". I can't infer the latter from the argument made, I can infer the former, which is all I did.

As to whether the concepts were made by Government either through courts or legislation it is not sufficient to claim something pre-dates the concept of legislation (as in a Bill introduced to a Parliament) to refute that. The context includes any action made by the representation of the State including a monarch. Yes, diffrent kinds of money flourished without central control. The only money that anyone ever relies on is the money that comes with the various levels of security created by the Government's role in money. Similarly the concept of a contract only required the two people entering into it to agree they wre agreeing, but the idea of contract as expressed in market theory requires all the elements that were created by judge-made law.

(Oh - and if anyone cares the following is not a grammatical sentence "You claiming that I am ignorant of the legislative and judicial origins of the three frameworks you mentioned when only one of them was a creation of common law and none of them were created by legislation. " )

Now as to the references to the Whirlpool action. The story is that ACMA issued a notice that one of the posts on Whirlpool included a link to prohibited content. The concern seems to be over the responsibility of the site hoster.

The bad news for Whirlpool and anything like it is that they aren't a mere conduit and that the site's owner has the same responsibilities as a newspaper. If a defamation action is brought then the site owner can be included.

Is that fair? Well, yes actually. You see the site owner has made the concious decision to have "unmoderated" comments - just like I have.

Researching the bleeding obvious

2009-03-09T19:29:00.001-07:00

ACMA has today released a research report titled Australia in the Digital Economy: Trust and confidence.

In their media release and the executive summary we are informed that

Australians value the internet and see it as critical to their daily lives...However, while Australians overwhelmingly see the internet as having affected their lives positively, they still have concerns about the potential for the internet to negatively affect their privacy and security. These concerns currently do not form a barrier to participation in the online environment, as increasing numbers of people use the internet for a wide range of activities including e-commerce and social networking.

One could posit that original primary research wasn't required to reach these conclusions. Perhaps the research is justified if it gives a clear lead on policy implications.*

The interesting part of the research is the analysis of users self-evaluation of their Internet skills where 36% od respondants rated themselves as above average skill levels (12% very, 24% somewhat), while 45% rated their skill level as average. (Of the 19% who rated themselves below average, it was 7% in very much below average and 12% somewhat). Is this possible? Shouldn't an equal number be below and above average? That depends on what meaning of "average" is used - if it was a median then that is what you'd expect, if it was a mean the kind of outcome above is possible. If we assume "average" means the mean plus or minus one standard deviation the outcome is possible on a hypothesised "score" of skills that would have a distribution that was clumped very much above the mean but had a very long distribution below it.

But that assumes that one can meaningfully "score" skills. It does pose the question of whether relying on user's self-assessment is appropriate versus actually testing those skills. A really useful study would involve testing the skills as well as seeking the self-assessment.

The report almost does this in its correlation of self assessed competency against the measures taken to protect against on-line risks. This is made somewhat difficult because of the reports measure of action taken. The Very much above average skills group had a relatively low level of having installed anti-virus programs, but they had a much higher level of "computer had filters/software installed when bought" which would typically include anti-virus. If we make that assumption there is overall the expected correlation between assessed skill level and level of protection.

The report itself errs by asserting that "eighty-one per cent of internet users are confidant in their skills". The error is that a user's belief in whether their skills are average or better does not equate to whether their skills are adequate or not.

The report's conclusion that high levels of self-assesed skills do not translate into taking proactive protection measures seems to be based on not including reliance on pre-installed software. Even were it true it is not sufficient evidence to support the reports major conclusion that

In order for consumers to continue to trust the internet and to ensure the growth of the digital economy, consumers need to be informed about online risks and ways to protect their computers and themselves from the more negative and harmful aspects associated with internet usage.

It is hard to determine how that conclusion can be reached on the basis of the evidence presented. This is compounded in the report's conclusion in stating "there is a critical role for industry and governments in the continuing improvement of consumer awareness".

In general the report is composed of relatively inconsequential statistics leading to disconnected conclusions that otherwise appeal to the interests of a regulator. Perhaps these weaknesses can explain why research conducted in June 2008 is being released in March 2009.

* Note however that this is one area where the current structuring of ACMA under an establising Act with three separate principle Acts to be administered creates some confusion. The question of how much policy analysis is meant to be done by ACMA as opposed to DBCDE is an interesting question.

Will the filter crowd come out to play

2009-03-08T23:07:00.000-07:00

The Federal Government is again using on-line technologies to help in policy development, this time on child care policy.

The last attempt was the blog on the Digital Economy, which got swamped by people posting about a completely different policy, albeit one covered by the same Minister. Will those same people decide to swamp the child care policy with the same kind of content? It is probably just as relevant as it is one Government not just individual Ministers who make policy.

Will they find some tenuous link - maybe some spurious argument that the money spent on internet filtering would be better spent on chld care? Or that Maxine McKew should replace Stephen Conroy because she would know more about media?

Let's see.....

Meanwhile legal abortions are a subject for discussion in NSW. The only tenuous link being the flurry over some images on an anti-abortion site being added to the ACMA blacklist.

But before people get too excited about the question of legality or otherwise, I wonder if the people of NSW realise that already legal abortions cannot be obtained in NSW public hospitals. We are already back to the horrible days of the 1960s where abortions were able to be procured by the rich (they always knew the appropriate doctor) and never by the poor.

Internet Filter

2009-03-03T21:37:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to bother linking to them, but I note that Stilgherrian has replied to my reply to his latest piece on the Government's internet filter trials and policy.

This was not what I started to write about, and I'm determined that I'm not going to respond anymore until something new real happens - that is, the results of the trial or an actual policy announcement.

Hmmm - a view on the post Sol world

2009-03-03T17:18:00.000-08:00

It has been interesting to see the reaction to the departure of Sol Trujillo. The first has been the tendency to use various Hispanic references to his departure, incuding the PM's "Adios" and a News Corp cartoon of Sol riding into the distance on his burro.

Equally interesting has been the morphing of the "thre amigos" to being Sol, Phil Burgess and Greg Winn, while the reality is that it was originally Sol and his three first wave colleagues, the two named and Bill Stewart.

Sol evidently has found the references to his Hispanic heritage to be verging on racist, which is a charge it is very hard to follow. Is it racist to liken Kevin Rudd to an over eager Belgian reporter? Has there been any part of the use of the Hispanic linkages to suggest that he is any lesser quality of a human merely through his heritage?

Meanwhile the firm he headed made a great trade in xenophobia, referring to their largest competitor as "Singapore Telecom", and focussing on the "Australian-ness" of Teltra (while still spruiking the shares in overseas markets).

It is interesting to see that Telstra's PR site "Now We Are Talking" has received a whole lot of negative assessments of Sol's contribution. This is a site that struggled to get comment that wasn't mere hagiography.

Meanwhile Telstra's own Kate McKenzie asks What's wrong with Australia, criticising the reaction of the media to Sol. Partly this seems to be a veiled comment on the Hispanic references. But another part is her sense that people who haven't worked for Sol directly don't really understand how great he is.

There is an element to which Sol, by his tendency to raise wide ranging ire, has drawn his own troops to him. Making everyone outside "the enemy" steels the resolve of his team. Members of the senior executive team get support from the CEO for being ontroversial, whereas in other more appeasement oriented regimes individual managers feel they can be cut off at any time.

Sol will, over time, be like ach of the last three CEOs (Ziggy, Frank and Mel - of Telecom), people under whom great things were achieved, some errors made, great profits extracted from monopoly rents but largely the great machine just grinds on.

Rudd Plagiarism

2009-02-18T14:07:00.000-08:00

The Courier Mail today has run a story accusing Kevin Rudd of plagiarism of 26 words in his essay for The Monthly.

The story doesn't acknowledge that this as first reported by The Oz on Monday. The difference between the two stories is that the Oz noted that the 26 words were indeed quotes that the two pieces shared in common, and the Courier Mail didn't acknowledge that the "research" was conducted by the Liberals.

So let me repeat the comments I made in Crikey on Tuesday.

Clearly the Liberals are sniffing the chance to hang Rudd with the same complaints that were made against Julie Bishop. This would be a great political win, and provide the deputy Liberal leader with some much needed cover. But we are then breathlessly informed "both men produced identical quotes from French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Chinese Vice-Premier Wang Qishan to demonstrate the weaknesses of the global financial system."

So what is the charge -- that both accurately quoted the original? Or that Rudd "cheated" by quoting the same sources. Claiming this is plagiarism is like suggesting two students cheated because they both quoted the "To be or not to be" soliloquy when writing an essay on Hamlet.

Far worse for their case though is the implication that the Liberals have already subjected the Rudd piece to the "Google test" of typing whole phrases into the search engine and looking for a match. If this is all they have found they should shut up about it. All they would do now is just highlight how egregious the plagiarism on their side of the House was.

Of Devils we Know

2009-02-17T22:03:00.000-08:00

The second part of the story about the departure of Julie Bishop from the shadow Treasurer's gig is what happens now to all those stories about a succession in NSW. Crikey and others have been full of the stories of various machinations to ensconse Joe Hockey in NSW, be it via Jillian Skinner's seat or some other.

These stories have been fed by the simple observation that the Liberals in NSW under Peter Debnam were unelectable, and that despite all the promises they don't look much better under Barry O'Farrell. There seems no prospect of jolly Joe making the transition now! So where do the desperate NSW Liberals turn now - on their form it is inconceivable that they'll run to the election without turmoil.

Meanwhile the three-fold shift in personnel hasn't done anything to improve the coalition front bench. Senator Coonan will be monumentally out of her depth in Finance, and will be no match for Tanner in a head-to-head on Lateline (and has anyne else noted how odd it is that she and her Senate leader now have officially swapped their jobs at the time of the last Telstra privatisation in Opposition). One wonders why the coalition weren't more adventurous and at least promote Andrew Robb to Finance. Does Robb now have a "lean and hungry look". Julie Bishop will make no impact on Foreign Affairs - but that is no change, either for Bishop or the coalition in Foreign Affairs. That leaves the only hope that Joe works as Shadow Treasurer. But looking at his form it is unlikely. In Government he was a good "Mr Fix-It", he is personable on the telly, but over does the senorious critique. But he has no record of really getting down and dirty in policy analysis - which is what the coalition has been lacking in economic policy.

Similarly the choice of the squeaky clean (or lean and squeaky) Chris Pyne as manager of opposition business seems strange. Tony Abbott might not be everyone's choice as their dinner companion, but his determination and mongrel could be expected to put some more spine into tactics.

We know they opposed the stimulus package, we know they sort of would like to see tax cuts brought forward. It isn't the job of Oppositions to promote alternative policy as such, but it is there job to create a framework around which their criticism is based. This was the lesson of the Beazley inheritance - no amount of looking serious and attacking a policy works unless the people you want to nod their heads as you make these points can really understand what difference you would make.

As the NSW Liberals are starting to realise there is a big difference between getting the punters unhappy or uncomfortable with the current Government, there is a big step in converting that into a positive belief that the alternative can be better rather than simply the general resignation that Government continually fails us. The benefits of incumbency are many, but the biggest of them all is "better the devil you know".

Harrassing a Minister

2009-02-17T21:50:00.000-08:00

The serial pest Stilgherrian had another comment in Crikey about the Internet filter.

I posted a short comment on his blog but also a longer piece that Crikey hasn't yet seen fit to print. The shorter piece tried to highlight the fact that Conroy is being attacked for spending too much AND too little on the trial. Stilgherrian in his reply tried to repeat the argment that a trial wasn't warranted because there wasn't a policy being trialled - which was the same technique used by Howard to kill the republic.

I don't know what it is about Stilgherrian that makes his near unintelligble prose such appetising content for Crikey. Somehow or other we are meant to believe that Conroy has unanswered questions about his internet filtering trial that he was supposed to "come out and answer" after issuing his press release announcing the first six triallists.

It would be an interesting story if there were an accredited journalist out there who had tried to get comment and was denied it.* But Conroy's media adviser was unlikely to be able to take any serious journalists calls as everytime he makes an announcement the lunatics post Conroy's e-mail address and the media adviser's mobile number on the Internet forum "whirlpool".

Take the post from "Gator" at 5:57pm last Wednesday "Conroy can shove this test where the sun doesn't shine. It's not even remotely valid. Quick – hammer his email. :P". Followed up with "minister@dbcde.gov.au There's his email – feel free to flood his inbox. Make the objections cogent and not just stating the bleeding obvious such a "you are a retarded, moronic self-serving bastige with the IQ of a watermelon and the timing of a lousy comedian on an off night" at 6:06pm.
It was btone at 6:32pm that posted "From the ahem...press release...aka political death warrant: For further information on the Government's cyber-safety policy, including detailed questions and answers, see: www.dbcde.gov.au/cybersafetyplan Date: 11 February 2009 Contact: Tim Marshall (phone number given in the post) Heloooo, Timmmmehhhhhh!!!!!!!!!! :)"

These are the people we are led to believe by Stilgherrian are the sophisticated opposition. Do they understand that the only thing guaranteed not to get politician's attention is the unsophisticated message attack? (Oh and by the way that e-mail address and phone number can be readily found on the internet if people really wanted to find them, not sure why the whirlpool brigade need to be given them).

The posts as a whole make interesting reading, as just as many people complan about the delay in the trial as complain about the trial. Well, actually, the same people complain about both. Just as the same people complained about the fact that Conroy only announced trials with small ISPs, ignoring the fact that they also announced they were continuing to work with other ISPs to finalise arrangements. (Mind you when someone pointed out the line about continuing to discuss with other ISPs, basil00 wrote at 10:45pm Wednesday "Yeah, I it's possible. But it's also possible that the above statement is a trick designed to defuse criticism over the exclusion of those larger ISPs :/ Didn't seem to work."

Seems the poor guy can't win - if he announces something its wrong, if he delays someting he's wrong.

Conroy keeps repeating this is a trial to inform evidence based policy. I ask you what distinguishes these internet libertarians from the christian moralists they seek to oppose - because it certainly isn't anything about being grounded in reality.

* Stilgherrian would argue from his post "His office has stopped answering even straightforward questions, and his own response to nearly every question is to ignore the substance of the question and just repeat his prepared statements. That’s not a debate, that’s a parrot. As one journalist put it to me, it’s pointless interviewing him because all he does is read out the media release." Maybe Stilgherrian would like to pay more attention to politics. Has he ever seen a Minister (or shadow) do anything else. It is called being "on message". As an example have a look at Christopher Pyne on Lateline last night.

The Trials of an Internet Trial

2009-02-12T13:51:00.000-08:00

Senator Conroy probably couldn't have imagined how hard the process of implementing policy in Government could be. Since coming to office the PM has referred to a concept of "evidence based policy", which Conroy has being trying to pursue on filtering by deciding that he won't make propose any laws to implement the clean feed internet policy until after some real trials have been conducted.

But getting to the point of the trials has been troubling. ZDNet reported that the Government had received 16 applications to participate. Telstra and Internode announced they would not participate, Optus announced they would participate in testing the blcklist only, and iiNet announced iot would participate to "prove it wouldn't work".

Yesterday Conroy announced that arrangements had been finalised with six ISPs to participate in the filter trials, and that consultations continue with a number of other ISPs. Good news one might have thought, the Ministr is behind schedule but getting to the point of conducting the trial.

Well, not as far as Senator Minchin was concerned. He saw something dark in the fact that the two biggest ISPs that had indicated they would apply weren't on the list. What is Conroy to do? One would think that the larger ISPs would have more concerns and therefore a more protracted discussion. If Conroy had waited to announce until everyone was signed then the delay looks longer, if he announces progress he gets criticised with who was chosen.

There has been no indication or rumour that anyone is failing to reach agreement on the trial. Yes, it is behind time, but can anyone remember the last time DBCDE or itspredecessor did ANYTHING on time?

Admittedly these triallists (apart from iPrimus) are all pretty small. That, however, is also a good sign because the suggestion was the cost would be prohibitive for small ISPs so presumably these guys are figuring out its worth pursuing.

But it does make you wonder whether there is a future for "evidence based policy", because the process becomes quite protracted. Just doing things behind closed doors and making big announcements might be better - things like a $10B Murray Darling Basin plan. That's more Senator Minchin's style.

The end of books?

2009-02-08T20:21:00.000-08:00

Let's see if I can bring together a number of strands today, that really go to the heart of the concept of the Digital Economy.

The Productivity Commission is currently conducting an inquiry into the parallel importation of books. This is a long running issue, and one which parts of the publishing industry take seriously enough to complain about one of the Commissioners on the grounds of bias.

As Crikey points out itis hard to distinguish principle from self-interest at times in this discussion.

But one wonders if the debate isn't really starting to happen just as the whole book business model is about to undergo the same shift as happened to music.

In the SMH on the weekend Naomi Alderton wrote about her conversion to e-books and how they were in fact a green solution. Her device of choice was an iLiad. Meanwhile Amazon is making books prepared for its Kindle reader to also be available on various smart phones. At the same time Google announced that it was making its vast resource of online books available to mobile phones.

In Australia Dymocks already offers digital books for a number of reader devices. Coming from the other direction Angus and Robertson offers the the storymaker which is their name for the Espresso Book Machine which can print and bind a rare or out of print book while you wait.

It would seem the future will not be about the physical importation or printing of books in any form.

As for me - I'd love to try out an e-book format. The Kindle looks great but only works for the US, while the iLiad offered by Dymocks claims to be able to handle any document you could print frm a PC.

Statistics

2009-02-08T19:29:00.001-08:00

I've mentioned before that our good friends at DBCDE in putting together a Digital Economy discussion paper have talked about access to Public Sector Information. Meanwhile the folks at Crikey provided a really good example of the use of statistics in their video of the day today (see below).

The video is a bit long, but the end of it is fascinating. These guys have started their own public statistics program called Gapminder. Some really interesting data series available and some fascinating tools as well.

Define "expert", define "employed"

2009-02-08T17:39:00.000-08:00

I posted a comment to Crikey about a correction that Henry Ergas made to a claim by Crikey. The original statement was "Despite the blatantly partisan nature of his columns, neither Ergas nor The Oz feel inclined to reveal that Ergas has been in the pay of the Federal Liberal Party, conducting Malcolm Turnbull’s own version of the Henry tax review."

Today's AFR has an item that calls Henry Ergas a prominent economist who is "the tax expert conducting the review of the country's tax system for Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull". Meanwhile the Australian publishes another Ergas piece, this time criticising the Rudd stimulus package, with again no reference to the relationship (however constituted) with Turnbull.

PS Until doing this review for Turnbull there is no record of him being a tax expert in any way. His CV he has been the expert on how big business should extract rents.

Productivity

2009-02-02T19:26:00.000-08:00

Ultimately the Digital Economy can be seen as a descripton of the wide set of productivity improvements delivered through the adoption of ICT. This is the most limited view, but it seems to be what the Government thinks it is.

Telstra has released a report and white paper, including its Telstra Productivity Indicator. As expected it has been able to turn this into good positive brand stories. The one in Busines Spectator confused at times the ACIL Tasman white paper with the outcomes of the survey conducted by Sweeney.

The observation that large numbers of businesses don't measure productivity improvement masks the fact that many firms focus is on the creation of new markets and products, which typically makes productivity measurement a difficult task.

Business Spectator also comes up with some extraordinary comparisons of Australian versus US productivity improvement over the last thirty odd years. These numbers don't sound right on the surface. But even if they did, in a choice between the US economy and the Australian economy I guess I'd choose ours.

Similarly the note that our productivity improvement had been concenmtrated in mining and agriculture is described as if it were a negative. The theory of comparative advantage in trade suggests you should work on improving your strengths, so it looks to me like we've ben doing the right stuff.

Also from the UK

2009-02-02T19:14:00.000-08:00

The interim Digital Britain report has been released. Initial coverage focussed on the call of broadband for all, whereas later coverage noted that the target was somewhat low at 2 Mbps.

The interesting part was the inclusion of that connectivity target in the report, whereas the NBN was excluded from consideration in our local DE consultation (with filtering), and there has been no reference anywhere to the proposal for a new Communications Service Standard made by the Regional Telecommunications Review.

It is frustraing that we really seem to be in a generally good policy area, but only the cogniscenti would get it because of the fractured policy framework.

The Power of Information

2009-02-02T18:32:00.000-08:00

Getting back to where we began, the Government's attempt at a blog on Digital Economy issues. One of the topics they tried to cover was the use of Public sector Information.

A second round of the UK consultations on this has come out, this time a highly innovative initiative of posting the draft report on a website in HTML form only designed to elicit comments on it bit by bit. Personally I find it a frustrating way to try to read the draft, but it would seem to be a better approach than the piecemeal "blog" the Government used on the Digital Economy.

As to the actual content, the recommendations focus on free open access (creative commons licences), but they also note that the online environment continues to evolve.

Once upon a time all State Governments had Government Prining Offices, but they got swept away by technology and outsourcing. In Canberra today the great focus is still on outsourcing, but the creatio of a modern day equivalent of the printing office might not go astray. At least for the purposes of cataloguing, maintaining archival copies, and establishing standards including on tagging and hyperlinks.

The future of investigative journalism

2009-02-02T13:57:00.000-08:00

In the rush to embrace the Digital Economy the decline of newspapers and other "mainstream media", is taken by some as a new democracy and reduction in the opinion making power of a few "media barons".

However, as the Toronto Star has noted the collapse of the old media model puts at risk the tradition of investigative journalism. This is the kind of journalism that often rquires an extensive commitment in investment to get the story, deep pockets to fight potential lrgal battles, and often stealth in accessing the whole story before details are revealed.

The Star notes a number of potential scenarios for how to fund this investigative journalism. The first is the suggestion by Nicholas Sarkozy that he will help newspapers by funding every eighteen year old for a subscription for a year to the newspaper of their choice (though in Australia university students can already access very cheap subscriptins). Other models are grants from foundations or a group in the US called ProPublica that is acting as a third party "research house" of stories (a kind of twist on the traditional shared resource newsagency like AAP that mostly distributes event based news).

The other model of course is that familiar in British models of the government funded public broadcaster. There is a feeling in Australia that the years of political attack on the ABC have worn it down and its investigative role is greatly contracted.

The item concludes with an exhortation;

Undoubtedly the list of models will grow. But, in my view, the important need is for the dialogue to begin. At stake could be nothing less than the vibrancy and health of our society.

That might be a bit over the top. But are there other models? Does it matter, can citizen journalism fill the gap?

Doom for the Internet or a piss weak story?

2009-02-01T20:02:00.000-08:00

Oh dear, Stilgherrian is pushing another piece of apocalyptic doom in Crikey today (not sure if its behind the paywall or not).

I've provided my response to Crikey as follows;

Stilgherrian has thankfully at last acknowledged that an index based filter of the internet can work without degrading the Internet. He now wants to have us believe that the process of delivering the blacklist to ISPs will bring the Internet crashing down all because of one example from Google.

The first and obvious answer, as demonstrated by his power supply story, is that there are risks in all networks, but the good news is that all networks have in place risk management plans. These processes are what enable networks to handle the outages they get. In the specific case of an index based internet filter the risk planning would include (a) after hours arrangements for communicating list failure with ACMA (b) a alarm bell that would ring if the list file was too big (if it specified as a list of ISP addresses unlike the list of URLs Google was using it couldn't happen from a single slash) (c) alarms that trigger before network traffic "fills" the network. And the actual scenario of the IP addresses the network engineers ned to access being included in the "blacklist" can similarly be dealt with by rejecting the blacklist file if it contains IP addresses required to run the network.

So thanks to Stil for providing the first exercise in risk planning for the implementation of the filter to a network. But it still fails, just like his political censorship and other scare stories, as a reason to not implement a filter.

Meanwhile, Crikey also reports on the consequence of the confirmation of the left-right deal for the effect on the SDA, aka "the shoppies".

As Crikey notes

For such an influential union, the SDA's history is enlightening. Crikey readers would be aware that its predecessor disaffiliated from the ALP in the wake of the 1955 DLP split. For the next 30 years, it functioned as the industrial base of conservative Catholicism until finally re-admitted to the party to shore-up Bob Hawke's base in 1984. However, its legacy remains for the most part undimmed.

That "conservative Ctholicism" used to be an important part of Stephen Conroy's personal power base. Maybe he'll venture to be a bit clearer about his filtering policy now!

Palindrome

2009-02-01T17:20:00.001-08:00

Wow - I finally found something that explains the Digital Economy

Or was it

Digital Switchover ... Ho hum

2009-01-29T17:16:00.001-08:00

One of the supposed great enablers of the Digital Economy remains the digitisation of various broadcast services. This week however we saw the juxtoposition of Senator Conroy announcing a new package of measures to encourage transition the day after the US Senate voted to delay analog switch-off from January to June. That Bill still hasn't made its way through the HoR.

What's this all about? According to the digital switchover taskforce Digital TV is simply a better way of broadcasting and receiving television signals. Digital TV offers superior picture and sound quality, widescreen pictures and a greater channel selection.

However as a piece of regulatory policy around the globe it has been promoted by the equipment industry keen to sell new stuff, and adopted by policy makers because of the wonder known as "the Digital Dividend". This dividend in its loftier guise is the ability for greater efficiency in the utilisation of spectrum, but in the grubbier realpolitik of Government and bureaucracy it is the opportunity to raise revenue by the auctioning of the spectrum.

In fact what the use of that released spectrum is is one of the core issues here. In the US the freed up 700MHz spectrum has already been sold with purchasers planning to launch different varieties of wireless broadband/4G mobile services.

In Australia there is no business case, desire or need for additional television channels. Why do Australia's obese kids need a 24 hour kids TV channel? Who will watch it from 10pm to 5am - maybe use that slot for real porn? The commercial networks have no idea what to do with their extra standard definition channels. TEN is going to offer a sports channel, but very much a niche and tier two sports channel.

The spectrum may be useful for additional wireless deployments, but most of the allocated 1.8GHz and a large slab of the allocated 2GHz lots sit unused, let alone the waste of space that is the 2.3GHz and 3.5GHz allocations.

So exactly what has Conroy offered to accelerate this process that generates the most doubtful of outcomes. Let's be picky - it is hard to know given all their seems to be is a scant media release. The package seems to be limited to Sunraysia (centred on Mildura) which the release quaintly calls Australia's "leading digital television region" - in reality it is the region first targeted for transition, on 30 June 2010.

The package of measures announced includesThe suite of measures includes:
* a package of in-home assistance to help targeted households
* a new satellite service to extend access to digital TV
* working with the local community to improve awareness and understanding of switchover
* a labelling scheme to help consumers to easily identify digital ready products, and
* a national call centre and a web site providing switchover information.

This doesn't tell us much, except it is notable that in a project designed for Midura the implementation is a "national call centre" - I wonder if Telstra is including in its regional presence plans the benefits to regions of national call centres?

The really telling point in all this is the solution to the fact that digital TV has worse propogation characteristics than analogue, as well as terrestrial digital TV there will be a new satellite service.

This begs the question of whether the Digital TV policy and the NBN policy are at al coherent. After all the NBN will be fully capable of delivering digital TV terrestrially, and the 2% of the population supposedly outside the NBN footprint would be served by the satellite. This was, after all, the expectation when the Negroponte Switch was hypothesised - that communications tradionally carried by air (TV and radio) would be carried by wire, and that communications traditionally carried by wire (voice) would be carried by air (wireless)

Of course, the defenders of terrestrial TV like to invoke how important it is that it is free. It isn't of course. You do have to buy the receiving device, and often an external aerial. After that it is only free if you watch the ABC (since Whitlam abolished TV receiver licence fees - believe it or not such things used to exist). The ads that pay for the content are all ultimately paid by the consumer.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like there is much hope of the far simpler policy - dual transmission for a lot longer period, and leave it to the TV networks to work out the migration. Taxpayers shouldn't be footing this particular bill.

News Online

2009-01-28T18:52:00.000-08:00

Back to the real subject of this blog, the Digital Economy. My many thanks to Crikey whose Video of the Day today was this gem from 1981.

It makes the whole excitement of the Digital Economy and particularly digital media look a bit dated when you realise that was 28 years ago. A lifetime!!!!

I'd be interested in any other similar over-hyped stories of the online world from the recent past. I still recall many Internet pioneers (notably Tom Koltai) promoting the idea that the Internet would make telcos redundant. Did anyone mention Bigpond?

It does mean that we always will be wrong when we engage in technology (and application) forecasting, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't engage in consideration of scenarios.

Life Matters

2009-01-28T16:23:00.000-08:00

This is meant to be a Digital Economy site but at the moment the Internet filtering project is the current only piece of policy substance so I think I'll keep talking about it.

For those interested there was a discussion about the policy on the ABC's Life Matters program. The participants were Jim Wallace and Mark Newton.

A very annoying discussion because Jim Wallace referred to "illegal content" which is not a current definition but went on to describe that as only "child pornography" - the stuff that it would be illegal to be in possession of. Mark Newton (perhaps justifiably because of the lack of clarity) relied upon the idea that the prohibited list equalled the mandatory blacklist; i.e. the "prohibited" material.

We had participants debating what the "clear intent" of the Government was - it might help if the Government was clear on its intent. Also a bit frustrating to have the facilitator putting Mark's arguments for him, though equally frustrating that the only "data" on the public interest remains the Newspoll data reported in the Australia Institute research.

Meanwhile Jim Wallace was elsewhere in the media responding to the US Government decision to change its stance on foreign aid and abortion, a stance that resulted in calls for Australia to do the same. I don't want to impose my values in this discussion, but note that for a person as Christian conservative as Jim to be clear that all he thinks should be in the mandatory ban is the RC stuff is something the libertarians should find comforting. Mind he is still specifying the opportunity that people should have the opportunity to "opt-in" for anything that is not "illegal" - the debate is then whether it is "opt-in" or "opt-out".

The US and Censorship

2009-01-27T23:09:00.000-08:00

Interesting that I haven't yet seen an Australian reference to the final decision in the US when the courts struck down the Child Online Protection ct for good.

Some of the reasoning was familiar. Most notably that removing net content because kids might see it was infringing adults rights to see what they want. The American Civil Liberties Union also said the act was ineffective because it didn't affect sites not housed in America. That sounds familiar.

Interesting questions are raised by this. What is the implication of the implied freedom of speech found by the High Court in the Theophanous case? Is the existing BSA provision unconstitutional?

Should the battle be over the filtering plan or the higher principle of enacting our own version of the First Amendment?

Campaigning against censorship

2009-01-27T21:02:00.000-08:00

A couple of times I've challenged those criticising the Labor Party's Internet filtering plan that they really sound like they should be mounting a campaign against existing censorship and classification laws, not filtering as such. At least my regular commentator Bob Bain seems to have a genuine interest here, and makes lots of valid points about the inconsistency of various State Laws - but the hotch potch of our Federation isn't easy to solve.

In the context of the Internet filtering controversy it is the Federal law that matters. And that law as it applies to other content does have the feature that content classifications can be appealed.

But before the current round of campaigners get too carried away I thought we should think about the anti-censorship campaigns of the past. The death of John Mortimer gave the opportunity for Felix Dennis, one of the three he defended in the Oz trial, to write a new short recount of that trial.

The interesting thing about it was that the trial was pursued as a conspiracy trial with potentially open-ended penalties. The editors found it hard to find legal representation, a fact that Dennis attributes to political machinations. Subsequent investigations revealed corruption in Scotland Yard in policing pornography and the fact that Oz was singled out for political reasons rather than moral ones (as it represented the "alternative society").

Despite the fact that Oz had its origins down-under our own censorship battles waged into the 70s. The SMH published a story under the titleThe Filth and the Fury in 2004 to coincide with an exhibition on censorship. It recounts some of the the tales of our other counter culture publishers.

[Wendy] Bacon admits she and her supporters - anarchists, libertarians and non-authoritarian socialists - were primarily interested in publishing anything that was forbidden. Whether a poem or article had any literary merit was irrelevant; adults should be free to read or see whatever "turned them on". Challenging authority through an attack on censorship was a form of "direct action". In the end it became the only raison d'etre of Tharunka (and its later forms, Thorunka and Thor).

it goes on

Though the immediate reaction of most people gazing at the innocuous exhibits in the exhibition will be one of bafflement - why would a censor be looking at that? - it's also a timely reminder that Government restrictions on what adults can and cannot see is still a sensitive issue in Australian politics, though formal censorship has been replaced by a classification system.

I don't think the current battle matches that battle at all. However, it does remind us that we should never relax and never be satisfied that "the Government" is acting appropriately.

But they are things that can be addressed through scheme design. It would be nice if the sound and the fury can be directed at that rather than notional point scoring about who said what when.

With friends like these ...

2009-01-26T01:09:00.000-08:00

The SMH has got into the act on the filter with two Op Ed pieces. Stephen Conroy is probably thinking with friends like these who needs enemies.

The enemy was the one trick pony Helen Razer who made her reputation on JJJ as a Gen Y version of a shock jock - trying to see how much of the audience she could shock. While I have nothing against her item, reading it you'd think that the clean feed was all about banning all R and X rated material. No reference to the RC stuff at all.

Meanwhile the friend was unfortunately Jim Wallace from the Australian Christian Lobby. While he rightly pointed out that the adult content filter is at the moment proposed to be only opt-out, he didn't drive home the point about the RC stuff either. And he shouldn't try to make a 30% speed degradation nor a 3% over-blocking sound trivial.

Me thinks it is time Stephen Conroy entered displayed the kinds of legislative moves he'll propose.

Political censorship, deception and other rubbish

2009-01-22T20:09:00.000-08:00

Stilgherrian has been given another run in Crikey today - this time outside the paywall.

I will offer the comment here I've offered to Crikey.

I really wish I hadn't clicked through to the images Stigherrian pointed to in his post, but I wanted to assess for myself what they contained. At core in his item Stilgherrian is making two claims. Firstly that the Internet is being treated differently as these images would be allowed on the TV news. Secondly that because these images appear on a political site, blocking them amounts to "political censorship".
The Television Code of Practice regulates content on television. The code applies the OFLC classifications to films, and their own classification scheme to programs, but not to news. The rules for news (etc) that these programs do not require classification, provided that the licensee exercises care in selecting material for broadcast having regard to:
2.4.1.1 the likely audience of the program; and
2.4.1.2 any identifiable public interest reason for presenting the program material.

It goes on
Material which cannot appropriately be classified AV or any lower television classification, because of the matter it contains, or the way that matter is treated, is unsuitable for television and must not be broadcast. In accordance with the Broadcasting Services Act, television licensees may not broadcast a program that has been classified "refused classification" (RC), or has been classified as X, under the Office of Film and Literature Classification Guidelines.

Now we all know the problem with the existing blacklist is that it is of RC, R18+ and X18+ material. I am happy to accept that the images displayed would fall into the R18+ or X18+ category. I sincerely doubt that any television network would think that those images met the standardsin the Television Code of Practice (did Crikey think to ask any?).

But it continues to be a mere assertion that the step after the technical trial will be the mandatory filtering of anything beyond RC. It is worth noting that Senator Minchin in all his professed concern has never bothered to defend the lumping together of RC, R18+ and X18+ i the Broadcasting Services Act in this way. Maybe Stigherrian might like to sharpen his campaign from being "no blacklist" to "blacklist only the RC list" (I'd join that campaign by the way).

But Stilgherrian's biggest claim is that the blacklisting of this site is political censorship. I don't know why he doesn't just resort to an unrestricted artistic defence of every image. Political censorship would only be occurring if the site were banned for the views it expressed. That isn't the case. It was de riggeur in the late 60's to claim (the Maoist claim) that all acts are political, that isn't the case here. The anti-abortion case isn't being stopped because of the message, just as it wouldn't be political censorship if an anti-censorship site were blocked because it chose to display censored information.

Being twittered about

2009-01-22T18:48:00.000-08:00

Somebody calling themselves a suburb and a postcode (I think 2037 is the Glebe postcode anyway) has twittered "Verity Pravda | Just what is your real ident | Please do tell us now"

I think I've dealt with this as much as I'm ever going to. Let me be more philosophical, is my "identity" anything other than a set of cultural artefacts or perceptions of me by others.

My identity is therefore fully revealed in this blog - asking more is a bit like saying to someone to "show themselves" by standing naked in Pitt St.

I know nothing about twitter ...

2009-01-21T18:47:00.000-08:00

and I don't think I want to. Looks like a very public version of MSN.

Anyhow I've been verballed in twitter, referring I believe to a comment by You Suck on Tech Wired Australia.

I've been verballed because even I usually have less typos than that (they aren't usually spelling errors).

In case Ben Grubb or Websinthe want to know, it wasn't me.

Opportunism versus vagueries

2009-01-21T15:26:00.000-08:00

Seeing the chance to create mischief Senator Minchin has today declared that "Underlying the Rudd Government's plan to screen the internet is an offensive message: that parents cannot be trusted to mind their children online."

This is just another great pieces of opportunism by a coalition that seems to forget they were the Government for the last twelve years. In trawling through every whirlpool post or Stligherrian blog to cobble this column together Minchin is happily ignoring that the mess in the BSA that treats Refused Classification and R18+/X18+ material together was his Government's creation.

Meanwhile Minister Conroy was addressing the ALIA Online Conference. In it he made a succinct defence of his policy. He acknowledged "concerns with ISP level filtering" adding that they "seem to focus on two aspects - technical issues and freedom of speech." He noted the differences between index-based filtering and dynamic filtering and repeated the objective of simply putting these to test - t enable "evidence based policy".

He went on;

And while we acknowledge there are technical issues to be tested, the Government does not view this debate as an argument about freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is fundamentally important in a democratic society and there has never been any suggestion that the Australian Government would seek to block political content.

In this context, claims that the Government's policy is analogous to the approach taken by countries such as Iran, China and Saudi Arabia are not justified.

Australian society has always accepted that there is some material which is not acceptable, particularly for children. That is why we have the National Classification Scheme. Like internet content, publications, films and video games are subject to regulation.

Libraries well know that there is regulation under existing Commonwealth, State and Territory legislation which makes it an offence to distribute certain material.

I know which of these two is making more sense - even if it does mean I'll be thought a Labor stooge.

The Internet of Things

2009-01-20T14:46:00.000-08:00

Let's get positive for a change...well at least for the start of the post.

Rob Salkowitz has written that "the Internet of things" is ready for prime time. This is the idea that connectivity moves beyond places or people to devices. As he writes;

The enabling technologies -- RFID, ubiquitous wireless and GPRS networks, Bluetooth, and other short-range transmission channels -- have become so cheap, small, and mundane as to be nearly invisible. Appliances increasingly integrate wireless connections, IP addresses, and Web interfaces as part of their basic design. GPS services are becoming standard on mobile devices.

The technology is here, and the economic stars are aligned. It looks like a pretty good bet that 2009 is the year that the Internet of Things finally gets real.

His colleague Jae Engelbrecht wrote in December that we should get ready for a Sensored Internet - in which he wasn't misspelling our filtering discussion but talking about the number of sensing devices now connected to the net.

He wrote;

What is changing is that sensors are becoming cheaper, smaller, and more energy-efficient. As a result, their use is growing exponentially. Companies, governments, and individuals are embedding them everywhere. For example: Motion detectors now switch on lights, turn on water, and dispense towels.

And these sensors are talking. Many are still not directly connected to the Internet, but that is changing fast. With the spread of IPv6, many of these sensors will have their own Internet addresses and in the future will be talking to each other with implications for online “noise” and traffic.

These are the kinds of things that seem to be missing from the DBCDE discussion on the Digital Economy. A big issue for me is that the Internet of Things really only works if we have IPv6. The Government is taking a very sanguine view, believing industry will adopt IPv6 when it is economically justified.

My problem is that IPv6 to work really requires everyone to adopt it. The larger Internet players have reasons not to. They can enhance their market power if they coral their end-users inside "private networks", thus also restricting the use of end-to-end applications. Adoption of IPv6 was strangely absent from the specs for the NBN.

Meanwhil at least full credit to Internode for their IPv6 implementation. See I do love those guys sometimes.

Macavity the mystery cat...

2009-01-18T21:57:00.000-08:00

For when they reach the scene of crime - Macavity's not there! *

But Stilgherrian pops up everywhere - today on ZDNet replying to an anonymous comment on ... you guessed it, filtering.

He's really fixated on the idea that a trial is going to be some monumental waste of resources. I think that he and others really fear that the trial might just demonstrate solutions that work.

* From the T S Eliot poem.

Under whelmed by poor logic

2009-01-18T14:12:00.000-08:00

I have been engaging with a number of people over at Stilgherrian on the subject of the content filter trials. It has resulted in a worrying collection of responses. Many of these responses seem to be coming from IT professionals, and I'd hope that the quality of the logic in their oprogramming exceeds the quality of the logic in their reasoning.

It is also fascinating that my defence of the concept of the trial is interpreted as a defence of al aspects of the policy. Perhaps this is because they incorrectly (as I've already advised) assume I'm some Labor staffer.

My long post there responded to a "blue pencil" argument from Mark Netwon (of whom I've previously spoken.) This has then received further responses.

A James Polley claims at my first step in demonstrating that there is a problem I fail, because the ACMA list contains URLs of websites that would be refused classification AND would be rated R18+ or X18+. That is, he is trying to argue that my claim that "There exists A" is false, because in reality "There exists A AND B". Well, actually it doesn't, and the syllogism "If there exists A and B, then there exists A" is perfectly valid.

Websinthe (aka Keiran Salsone) opines that "The government is filling a void better filled by private industry. If the internet was as horrible and nasty as you claim it is, wouldn’t the free market rush to fill the void? Wouldn’t business interests demand that the internet be made a better place before attempting to do business there?" This is a very interesting and unsurprising point of view in the twenty-first century. It presumes the concept of spontaneous organisation of orthodox economic theory - which conveniently ignores that such essentiel features of the economy like property rights, contract law, and money were not the creation of private economic transactions but of Government either as legislation or courts. What is happening in e-commerce may be massive, but it is still a lot less than it could be because of these confidence issues. Further there are many e-commerce transactions that utlise the full suite of IP technologies but go nowhere near the public internet.

Websinthe also says "The beauty of the internet, and the reason it has expanded so rapidly, is that it defies all attempts to regulate it." Well, the main reason it proliferated was the initial investment by the US Military and its extension into every University as a research network. It remains the creation of Government, it lives on regulation (be that the self regulation of the IETF or all those court cases about protecting domain names).

He continues "Creating an infrastructure whereby a misguided future government or a malicious external power could block whole swathes of internet is just poorly thought out rubbish." Not creating the infrastructure now does not make the task of a future government to block the Internet any easier. The only thing that protects you is protecting democracy itself, and democracy means that process of regular collective decision making, not the ability for everyone to make their own decisions.

Stilgherrian tries the other twist on my claim that the ACMA blacklist contains refused classification material, claiming "It contains content which, in the opinion of an ACMA officer, might be refused classification. Only the Australian Censorship Board (formerly the Office of Film & Literature Classification) and any subsequent appeals courts can actually refuse classification. It’s a flawed process." Mark Newton had another go in the version "so we’re really just trusting a public servant about the whole damn thing." I hate to point out that technically the OFLC is just another public servant, and that classification in general can be processed by other people, for example TV stations do their own classifying. The current law from which the "blacklist" is composed is only really effective in prohibiting content from being hosted in Australia, and as a consequence both are right in thinking that there has not yet been any judicial oversight.

However, were the list to be used to block access to a site, then various parties would be able to challenge that decision. That process would require a court to determine whether the content did meet the appropriate definition - so you get to the same outcome as for the OFLC. It is a pity that we don't know what form the final legislative support for a mandatory filter would look like because that would help us understand how this process would work. But the bottom line is the current list doesn't get a lot of review because (apart from being provided to filter companies) the list doesn't result in anything.

I'm really greatful that Stilgherrian explained to people how BGP based filtering works, basically from the list of URLs to be blocked you determine the list of IP addresses that host those URLs. At the border of the ISPs network you route those IP addresses only off to the filtering solution. So the vast bulk of Internet traffic suffers no degradation. The other good news is that each ISP only needs to know the IP addresses, and they can contract to a security company the analysis of that traffic for whether it is to the dodgy sites. This reduces the cost to the industry and the number of people who have to access the blacklist.

Mark Newton argues that the Government didn't go to the election with this policy. The ALP's "Plan for Cyber Safety" stated;
That is why Labor will provide a mandatory ‘clean feed’ internet service for all homes, schools and public computers that are used by Australian children. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will filter out content that is identified as prohibited by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). The ACMA ‘blacklist’ will be made more comprehensive to ensure that children are protected from harmful and inappropriate online material.

Mark Newton also wants to restate the objectives so that the project fails. I wrote that the objective was to stop people navigating to a URL using a standard brwoser. Newton says this will fail because of the use of open proxies, using an online English to English translation, or getting "circumvention features commited to the firefox search tree." Problem is that none of those is navigating to a URL using a standard browser.

He also gets stuck into the Minister for not working with industry. It is a bit hard to argue this point given the recent history between Newton and the Government. But it does look to me like he's trying, in fact, trying a lot more than other Ministers. Not trying would look like introducing a Bill to impose the mandated clean-feed and be done with it.

Mark also tries to argue that the existing classification scheme doesn't prohibit an adult from viewing RC material. The Attoney-General's website states "RC films and computer games cannot be legally sold or distributed in Australia." To argue that this doesn't prohibit them being viewed is a matter of sophistry, because before it was viewed it had to be sold or distribted - unless you made it yourself. Mark also is fixated on whether the list would leak or not. I guess we agree to differ on that, except that the leaking of the list becomes less of a concern if it is used to block sites. The kinds of people who know how to circumvent the block probably don't need the list.

The person who made tremendous sense was Bob Bain, who points out that we haven't been totally successful in standardising the existing classification rules yet. But as I have also said, I would be really happy to see a solid debate about what the classification rules should be and how the rights of people to access material should be protected. But that should be medium neutral.

Another rant from Stilgherian

2009-01-14T20:09:00.000-08:00

Stlgherian has ranted on Crikey again today about filters.

Simple question. Does this raving lunatic think there should be no classification system on any media.? Or that there should not be a Refused Classification category at all? If so I look forward to his campaign on that change.

I heartily agree that the policy is being handled atrociously. But Stil continually misrepresents what is proposed. Nothing about the filter is about the threat to children from being entrapped on line. The "protection of children" the Minister talks about is the protection of children from taking every action he can to stem trade in the images.

It is the functional equivalent of protecting elephants from poaching by banning the trade in ivory. It doesn't mean you don't also have programs to catch poachers. But you sure as heck don't put up a special entrance way at your ports saying "if you have potentially illegal items please enter here".

And at this point all the Minister is asking is that ISPs try blocking acess to the websites and tell him how it works - that looks like real evidence based policy rather than just one persn saying "it doesn't work". By the way, saying something more than once doesn't make it true.

And exactly why is Crikey providing his rants. Since when has Crikey been a paragon of a complete libertarian view on content. Goodness me only yesterday Stephen Mayne seemed to be promoting ASIC's investigation of those Packer stories and - horror - quite calm about the idea of the journalist being forced to reveal their sources. Somehow I thought that was on the taboo list.

(Stil has responded)

More on the internet

2009-01-11T17:16:00.000-08:00

Mark Newton, the engineeer from Internode over whom a bit of a storm developed last year over (incorrect) accusations that Minister Conroy's office had heavied IIA to have him curtailed, has written to Policy on the subject. Policy is the magazine of the Centre for Independent Studies, a leading laissez-faire think tank.

I haven't usually associated it with the libertarian bent though, I would think its sponsors are more from the socially conservative right. The problem with Mark's analysis is that he again assumes that once Senator Conroy has proven the ability of a blacvklist website filter that all other aspects of the regme stay the same.

I suspect that were there to be success on the blacklist filter technical trial some of the other issues would be easier to deal with. This includes changing the rules to provide more accountability on the generation of the blacklist.

Finally, a little note because onroy's line about the purpose of the filter being about "protecting children" has been interpretted as being about protecting children from seeing the images - it isn't. It is about protecting the children who are the subject of the images.

Lognormal and power law distributions

2009-01-08T19:44:00.000-08:00

It turns out that Anderson has grappled with the lognormal vs power law distribution stuff before. He gives some very good references.

It is interesting that he claims that his long tail thesis isn't much affected by the difference, but it actually is. That's the real relevance of the study published. I think he also grossly over-estimates what the total size of the long tail can be in any market, but that's for another day.

Long tails

2009-01-07T16:19:00.000-08:00

I've not yet read Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail but I know I have to sometime. Its thesis is something to do with how the dynamics of new industry models are dramatically effected by the myriad of niche players that can exist courtesy of the Internet. I'm a sceptic, let's say.

The Times has published an item on a piece of research that claims to dispute the theory. The interesting news is that Anderson runs his own blog and has dealt with this piece of research.

His response is that the consequences of the sales from one retailler does not disprove the thesis. The longer version of this which he posted earlier reveals that the study reveals a lognormal distribution rather than the pwerlaw distribution of the long tail. The only other place I've seen powerlaw distributions referred to was a book by Benoit Mandelbrot (a leading chaos theorist/fractal geometer) called The (Mis)behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Market Turbulence.

I'm not sure I fully grasped what was going on in that book, but I think it was that random processes actually behave as if thy are going on in fractional dimension space not integer dimension space. If that is correct it has huge implications for all aspects of economic theory - not least because all econometrics is based on the assumption of errors following a normal (Gaussian) distribution.

Footnote: Other references to the Times article are here (which is where I heard about it from) and here.

More on Minchin

2009-01-06T14:02:00.000-08:00

Senator Minchin has had another go at Conroy over the NBN, this time in the Oz. It was, however, rather delightful that the link to the article on Breakfast Politics was Conroy should roll over to Telstra.

That was exactly the thrust of the article, and included the claim that Telstra had been excluded for "the most trivial of reasons". So now we know that Minchin's stance is that OPEL should proceed despite not meeting the standards of the contract and that Telstra's proposal for the NBN should be considered despite not meeting the requirements of the tender.

It is worrying that his parliamentary biography shows that he holds a BEc and LLB and was a solicitor before commencing his party positions. However, given he was only 24 when he started being a full time politician, maybe he didn't get to practice much law.

Certainly his experience as a Minister in the Howard Government wouldn't have taught him much about process.

His article concludes;

Before it is too late, Conroy should go back to the drawing board, sit down with all key relevant players and plot a more sensible, practical and realistic course to upgrade our nation's broadband capability.

It is disappointing that Senator Minchin is unprepared to take his share of the blame for this mess. The deal he and the Howard Government weere trying to pull off - OPEL for Optus, regulatory change requested by Telstra - would have been a disaster. The flawed tender and its idiotic concept of "competitive tension" is entirely built on the former Gvernment's approach which was to tender for policy.

The bottom line is that if the coalition had spent more time thinking about telco policy rather than how to maximise sale proceeds, we would not be in any kind of mess.

Wake up Senator Minchin

2009-01-04T21:47:00.000-08:00

The supposed coalition communications spokesman had a short letter published in today's Australian Financial Review. As there is no free on-line version I will quote it completely.

It is a good time to ask why our broadband services haven't dramatically improved as a direct result of action taken by the Rudd government. It is an important question because, when in opposition, Mr Rudd used broadband as a key election issue and made all sorts of big promises and inferences. He and his now Communications Minister Stephen Conroy gave the impression they would wave some magic wand and make our broadband speeds significantly faster almost overnight.

They promised that before the end of 2008 construction of a new high-speed fibre network would have begun and Australians would already be benifitting from new services. But the government, which oplans to spend $4.7 billion of taxpayers' money, has yet to select a network builder and it is doubtful any national rollout will start in 2009.

Significantly, the broadband network promised by Labor will take at least five years to build, and more likely eight, yet the government inexplicably cancelled the previous government's rural and regional broadband network project. The OPEL network would have delivered new services to more than 500,000 under-serviced premises by mid-2009.

A shocking piece really, given that the government's preferred model is to invest the $4.7 bilion, not spend it. Also he ignore the fact that one of his moves in parliament was to try to stop the $2 billion in the Communications Fund from being invested in the NBN.

But the real houler is the reference to the government "inexplicably" cancelling the OPEL contract. It is not difficult or impossible to explain the cancellation - just read the Minister's media release at the time. There he could read the Minister's words;

DBCDE performed an analysis of the detailed testing and mapping undertaken by OPEL, and determined that the OPEL network would cover only 72% of identified under-served premises. On the basis of DBCDE's assessment, the Government determined that OPEL's Implementation Plan did not satisfy the condition precedent of the funding agreement, and as a result the contract has been terminated.

Seems pretty well explained to me.

But Minchin can't help hmself on this sort of stuff. I was quite coincdentally cleaning out my study yesterday and came across an AFR from 22 March 2001. It reads (in part) as follows.

Flagging greenhouse as an election issue, the Federal Government has attacked Labor's environment policy, arguing it would cost jobs.

Labor's commitment to introducing a national greenhouse emissions trading scheme is "most alarming", the Industry Minister, Senator Nick Minchin, told the AFR. "This isgoing to be a major negative for the Labor Party: it would be a huge disincentive for investment and would cost many jobs in Victoria," he said.

The article concludes;

Senator Minchin echoed Foreign Minister Mr Alexander Downer's support fr the reiteration by the US of its rejection of Kyoto. "I welcome the US's reiteration that without the participation of China and India the protocol's not workable," Senator Minchin said.

You really get the feeling that Minchin is a politician whose time has been and gone and should join many of his former felow ministers in alternative employment, or a decent retirement.

Nonsense

2009-01-04T20:12:00.000-08:00

I've added Stigherrian to the blog roll - but more out of anger than anything else.

He had yet another piece about Internet filtering in Crikey today (in the subscriber section so I haven't linked it). The following is the comment I've offered to Crikey (that they chose not to publish)

Re: Conroy attacks BitTorrent: Ruins Australia online Stilgherrian is now well reowned amongst Crikey readers as an Internet censorship hater, but you really should be reading what he writes before you print it. His opening paragraph critices the Government's filtering plan without showing any recognition of what the plan entails - so that he continues to repeat the nonsense that the "filter" won't work.

The Government has never anounced a plan to ensure everyone is safe, just that it wants to implement something that looks like the existing classification scheme (that applies to books, movies etc) to websites. The fact that it can be by-passed by other means (e.g. by e-mail or snail mail) isn't the point. And the point of a technical trial is to see what happens.

I'm reminded of the might with which telcos claimed that they could do nothing about Internet dumping in the early part of the decade, only to find via this morning's SMH that Optus was up to their necks in it.

Your correspondant goes on to claim that Conroy's comment about possibly filtering peer-to-peer traffic amounted to a plan to block all BitTorrents, then goes and quotes one legitimate BitTorrent user to get a reaction to the inaccurate conclusion. All of it is garbage.

Meanwhile if Stilgherrian really believes his rhetoric on censorship let's see him start a campaign to have all Refused Classification material allowed into Australia as X+ because - using his logic - existing restrictions won't guarantee that none of it will get in.

The DE Blog Ends (wih a whimper)

2009-01-04T17:50:00.000-08:00

Well - the DBCDE blog ended just before Christmas. It was nice to receive acknowledgment on the last post for my efforts. Pity they didn't link to my blog rather than just one of the posts though.

Dave Bath and Sam D both were deserving of that recognition though. Dave gave a good summary of the failings of the blog in general though. I must check his references to the AGIMO work on blogs and consultation.

It is a pity though that most of the coverage of australia and the Digital Economy continues to be about filtering. HotSearch picked up that the blog was swamped with filtering stories. Meanwhile Arts Technica picked up on the leaked then released report on filtering that was the diversion at the end of the year, while UbNews picked up Conroy's comment that the Government would look at peer-to-peer filtering as well. Even the The Minneapolis Star Tribune got into the act.

It ultimately is a pity that the discussion paper released by the Department did show that the blog was just the discussion paper released in pieces (though a different order).

Now We Are Talking

2008-12-28T15:39:00.001-08:00

Following the kerfuffle over Telstra's exclusion from the NBN I made a couple of desoltury posts on Telstra's horrible interactive site called "Now We Are Talking".

My first post* was in response to one of the many on the site that accuses the Government of underhanded behaviour in selling Telstra shares at "inflated prices".

The preson I criticised replied that if choise meant buy or not buy then we didn't need competition in telecommunications.

I have posted a subsequent reply but it is distressing how little people seem to get the whole idea of competition policy, and the basis on which Telstra was sold.

Meanwhile my post on their news item about the exclusion from the NBN received no other comments.

NWAT as a communication tool ultimately is failing just as much as the DBCDE single attempt at blogging.

* It is a feature of the NWAT "Permanent Link" field that you just get the part of a page of posts rather than just the individual post. This can be frustrating because on my link to Hibble in the post linked here there are two comments by him, you need to find the one I was actually commenting on.

The Filter/Clean feed

2008-12-22T17:07:00.000-08:00

Interesting that the SMH plastered a story about the web filter plans across the front page of the print edition but buried it on their website.

The story is a first order beat up because it doesn't address the filter pilot as proposed, but talks a lot about a range of issues that are not being considered. The most significant of these is the idea that this is some kind of dynamic filter - which it is not.

In fact "filter" is the wrong term. It is better called a "clean feed" as all it is designed to do is block access to specific web-sites.

People in the know actually tell me that the conclusion of the report leaked to the SMH is that a filter that just attempts to block access to a blacklist is entirely achievable, while relatively easy to circumvent.

Digital Economy News

2008-12-22T13:47:00.000-08:00

The Department blog got around to a post on the Internet filter. One really does despair about people who engage in "black is white" conversations. I have made a contribution that hasn't got through moderation yet to demonstrate my case.

Meanwhile the fact that our Minister is engaging in DE consultation has made it to an online source called TelecomPaper but I can't tell you what it said because I subscription is required.

Meanwhile, our partners in the "coalition of the willing" are now both making news about the DE. This is all a bit fun because when the PM announced that he was habving a department for DE some suggested it was a bit passe because the DE was here now.

British PM Gordon Brown in his final press conference of the year announced the Government would be bringing forward fresh measures in the new year for "smart investment" in "green" jobs, the digital economy, and the transport infrastructure.

Meanwhile in the US there is continuing coverage of the Obama plans. Under the heading Obama Looks to Give Digital Economy Shot in the Arm PC World reports that Obama has promised to renew the US information superhighway. They report that

Broadband expansion is likely to be a priority for Obama's administration. Although the U.S. currently has about 75 million broadband users, the [OECD] ranks it only 15th out of 30 industrialized countries on broadband adoption. In his speech, Obama called the level of access in the U.S. "unacceptable."

Sounds like he wants to build his versio of the NBN. So much for those in Australia who keep trying to use the US as an example of how to do the Internet.

So it must feel great to be Rudd and Conroy and be so far in front of the pack.

Little more action

2008-12-16T22:51:00.000-08:00

I've found another blog commenting on the DE blog - this time it is a blog devoted to Government use of Web 2.0. The post has mostly negative things to say about the blog.

Here's a few I want to add.

1. No one seems to be sure how the whole HTML part is working. Certainly easy things like breaks and italics can be done, but not all hyperlinks are rendering properly. And whoever is doing the moderating doesn't know what they are up to, because clear HTML errors (like the unfinished italics I put on a post) aren't being corrected and hence can screw up the site.

2. It is impossible to follow anything. With something generating as many comments registering commentators like they do on nowwearetalking might have been good. Also if you really want to get the blogsphere going you need the opportunity to be linked to your blog through your name - pretty standard in comments fields in standard blog tools.

3. There has been a fair bit of commentary about the whole "single voice" thing and whether the Government could let "individuals" speak. As I said elsewhere they do speak in person - I can say "At a meeting Thelma Tissue said blah, blah, blah" - why nt a blog? But failing that they could have created a umber of pseudo personalities whose job it was to present different views such as;
The DE sceptic - whose job it was to represent that the whole idea of a digital economy was a nonsense
the optimist - the DE will change the world but we don't need to do anything
the visionary - the person who has ever more grandiose deas of what the DE will deliver
the practical one - the person who says that its all very good but that these things take time
Those personna's could have engaged with the few respondants who've been on topic to try to progress a discussion - as it is we aren't achieving much.

Finally two of my three contributions to the last post whave so far been published, here and here. Note how I learnt between the two about line breaks, but (at least when I linked to it) screwed up the closing of the italics?

More on Telstra

2008-12-16T21:01:00.000-08:00

With things being so slow on the DE front I commented twice on Telstra's nowwearetalking "thinggy" yesterday, here and here.

Both were on the theme that this wasn't a Government action, but a Telstra action and that shareholders should start examining the decisions of the Board. My observation is that there has been a decided shift on the site - the punters are starting to think the proble might be management not Government.

That leads me to the speculation doing the rounds that the Telstra management and Board carefully planned all this. That they wanted to be seen to be helping but intentionally failed to fulfill the mandatory requirements so they could go Government bashing.

Sounds like a great theory and fits our Machiavellia view of Telstra. But it doesn't fit the facts, including that Telstra did submit the SME plan on 4 December (no need to do that if you want to be excluded), and the tunderous response from Trujillo is more reminicent of a spoiled child than simply an affronted exec.

This perhaps gives the lie to the widely held beief that Telstra are great strategists. They aren't really. As a General you don't need to be a great strategist if you outnumber the enemy 100 to 1. What you need is good tactical discipline that the forces deploy as directed. Finally Telstra might be meeting a force that matches them.

Finally, I wonder how come no one has wondered that it is ONLY Telstra that has a cash flow to fund this investment. In the economics trade they call that a monopoly rent.

More commentary

2008-12-15T21:27:00.000-08:00

The former politician who really got the art of blogging (and now I think professional blogger) Andrew Bartlett has offered a short comment on the DE blog. His short summary - there ios not too much two-way conversation happening so far.

He also identified a contribution by Jacques Chester at Club Troppo. His summary is that "single official blogs" might not be the best approach.

He also identified the comment by Robert Merkel at Larvatus Prodeo. He poses the comment that "it’s hard to reconcile such an open process with the traditional way lobby groups get to influence policy - off-the-record conversations with ministerial staff." erhaps, of course, that's just the point. To break the hold that business has over the policy process. Anyone interested in this should read Robert Reich's book Supercapitalism for a view of how competition (primarily driven by communication and information technology) has made us value things more as consumers and investors than as citizes and how this has distrorted the democratic process.

It is a pity to note that these three latest comments have been more about the blogging than about the digital economy. This poses the question "Is there any body out there?"

Really slow action today

2008-12-15T18:16:00.000-08:00

Nothing seems to be happening in DE blog land. Posts slowing to a trickle.

I was thrilled to see this post from Laurel Papworth on the site though.

As always she takes the discussion to a completely higher level, of how much the changed economic relationships embeded in in social networks can impact economic structures. Fundamentally she identifies the extent that "disintermediation" (as we used to call it) as has bee applied to media can be applied to shopping, banking etc.

When you think about it the complete opposite of the financial structures we've come to think of as "the sub-prime crisis" can be removed if individuals seek their house funding directly from "the net" and individual depositors can subscribe for specific amounts. It is not particularly fanciful.

What the media says

2008-12-15T00:00:00.000-08:00

Wow. The media is even getting the story wrong!

The sub editor at The Herald-Sun gor the story about the blog so wrong he headed it Government launches blog asking for feedback on plans for web filter. It is extraordinary that paragraphs like;
Anti-censorship advocates are also concerned that a secret "blacklist" of websites to be blocked could be expanded in the future to include political material.
can make it into mainstream media. What part of the blacklist is controlled by an independent regulator applying the standards of the Film and Literature classification scheme don't these journalists get? Do they understand that they couldn't print any of the material being filtered in any state in Australia?

Under the heading Tell Conroy exactly what you think
the SMH has also joined the fray mostly running the comments about filtering and including a link to a filtering protest.

Seems like no one wants to seriously try online consultation, nor worry about the digital economy. A great pity.

Oh Dear

2008-12-14T23:52:00.000-08:00

There is something else severly wrong with the DE blog. Seems that there is lots of confusion about the way links need to be embedded. Take this post as an example - virtually the whole messagehas been turned into a hyperlink when it looks like the submitter had typed in a URL.

That really needs fixing.

Thanks Anonymous

2008-12-14T23:43:00.001-08:00

An anonymous comment to an earlier post suggested I "keep an eye" on David Bath. I've done more than that I've added him to the Blogroll (Balneus).

He started a post with this memorable comment;
So many bleeping idiots! The government was putting a toe in the water of improved electronic consultation, and so many people bit the toe off (rather than wait a bit for at least an entire leg to become available).

I thought it was a great summary. The continued swarming of that blog with off-topic comments will be used by many in Government to oppose any more experiments like this. You can almost hear the conservatives now "give women the vote...sorry ... I mean encourage feedback, and see what happens".

Unfortunately the DE blog hasn't got better.

Kohler has it half right

2008-12-14T23:10:00.000-08:00

Alan Kohler has speculated on the Telstra NBN bid. Under his thesis the fact that McGauchie did all the spruiking of the bid for the NBN reflected a division between the Board and the CEO. Under this theory Sol didn't want to bid for the NBN, the Board did so the Board prepared the proposal.

This "Board preparation" piece is then used as the explanation of why the Small business plan was left out.

I suspect Kohler is half right. There is no doubt Telstra prepared a complete bid, they have so frequently told everyone what it would take, and why they are the only ones who can do it. The supposed reason for not bidding was the failure to get certainty out of the Government on the separation question. The practical reality of concern was that the Telstra bid would have provided a perfect blueprint for conducting the separation.

Clearly there was disagreement because it was left to such a late part in the process. My sense is that Trujillo wanted to bid but the Board didn't ... I could be wrong. I would be surprised if it were the other way round that Trujillo wouldn't have walked. Also the rejection of the "proposal" has brought Trujillo out in his most thunderous.

Either way I keep wondering when the institutions are going to tap Telstra's Board and say we've had enough of the Chair and CEO.

And more

2008-12-14T19:42:00.000-08:00

Writing in Crikey Business Spectator's Tony Boyd said

Trujillo's final dramatic quote to the analysts was "Nothing Stops Telstra".

But so far, it has to be said, that whenever Telstra has taken on the government it has lost.M

Once again I ask when will the Telstra shareholders start to notice. It is not as if the much vaunted "transformation" has delivered anything either.

Telstra and the NBN

2008-12-14T19:18:00.000-08:00

Wow! Telstra has bee excluded from the NBN tender for the relatively trivial matter of not including an SME plan. Though as I said on nowwearetalking it really is Telstra who've excluded themselves.

Everyone involved in Commercial tendering knows the importance of complying with the mandatory components of a response. Telstra aren't exactly novices.

As Conroy has said in his media release Telstra's Board will have to explain to its shareholders why it has decided to sideline itself from a process that will shape the Australian communications sector for the next decade.

How long have Sol and Donald got?

Getting in the first kick

2008-12-11T21:22:00.000-08:00

I'm sure the topic on the DBCDE DE blog tomorrow will be something about the Online Communications Council document Framework for the collaborative development and use of broadband in Australia.

The OCC announced;

We, the members of the Online and Communications Council, express our commitment to this Framework as a basis to work together to enhance the development and effective use of broadband in Australia.

We agree that promoting the development and effective use of broadband will enhance Australia’s economic performance and environmental and social wellbeing.

Australia should aspire to become one of the world’s leading digital economies. We intend to work together to facilitate this outcome.

We share a vision of a cohesive national approach to stimulate and strengthen economic, environmental and social outcomes, through the development and effective use of broadband, for all Australians.

So I thought I'd get in first (and not just the point that when the Minister sent out his media releae the online version of the document required a password). The document breaks the matter into three priority areas of availability, take-up and usage. It is extremely hard to differentiate these from the strategies about getting greater use of the digital economy, which is one reading of the DE agenda.

The really fascinating part is that the "strategies" identified in the second two priority areas are framed as We agree to work towards:, which is probably the weakest phrase that has ever been drafted to introduce strategies. No commitment to do anything at all about the sub targets, no description of what the items might be.

For a document that took about a year to generate, the content seems a bit light on. At least there are no commitments (like building the NBN) to comeback and haunt anyone.

An NBN for the USA?

2008-12-11T19:18:00.000-08:00

Just as everyone in Australia has got to the point of thinking the Digital Economy is passe (don't know how to put an acute on that e), and that the US competitive market is a poster child for the roll out of broadband and Obama goes and steals Kevin's policies.

As one commentator says Obama's plan will represent the first major stimulus effort since the creation of a "digital economy".

Obama has announced plans for his stimulus package to include building more high speed internet conections in under-served areas.

What will be next - a digital economy blog?

The Blogroll

2008-12-11T18:49:00.000-08:00

I've added a blogroll to this site. The items listed have been chosen for simple reasons.

The Bartlett blog was chosen to show what a political blog looks like. This was started back when he was a Senator. The Gans blog has been included to show what an economics news commentary blog can look like, especially someone with an interest in communications policy. The Quiggin blog is included as both an economist and someone who is trying to occpy the websphere, it is very interactve with other blogs.

Finally I include the queen, Laurel Papworth. This is not only a great blog with all sorts of bells and whistles - it is a great source on all aspects of social networking.

These would be a good resource for all these DBCDE people who are the "DE blog team".

Creative Commons

2008-12-11T18:42:00.001-08:00

One of the funnir things about the DE blog has been the people posting (like this) about the use of Creative Commons licencing for the PSI.

There are two interesting parts to this. The first is that the Assistant Secretary in the Department with responsibility for the Digital Economy was the General Counsel for Creative Commons - so I guess they know. The second is that the recently complted report by Terry Cutler on innivation was criticised for being copyright to Cutler, whereas Cutler's defence was he wanted it published using a Creative Commons licence but no one knew how to do it.

The DE Blog in blogs

2008-12-11T15:48:00.000-08:00

I've tried to see if the DE blog has been picked up in many places, has it made an impact. Beyond The Fringe made a comment but mostly wanted to talk filtering.

Australian Women Online picked up the media release as a news story, but it has made no impact on their "Tech Chat". There is a fascinating discussion there about filtering though, and the experience of the moderator in coming out in support of the filtering plan. It is fascinating how the technorati really are exhibitting swarm behaviour on this topic. One sometimes wonders if they have evolved beyond bees.

The repot in The Australian IT blogs seems to have scored no comments at all. The article has a degree of cynicism about whether the comments to the blog will have any impact on a paper due to be delivered early next year.

That cynicism is shared by Samuel Douglas who writes, I’m deeply cynical/realistic, so I will put my money on most suggestions being ignored.

Interestingly doing a search found me a hit for Laurel Papworth which was interesting but not actually a comment on the DBCDE blog. But Laurel doesn't have anything to say about the DBCDE attempt at blogging yet. Interestingly I know that Laurel was recommended to the Department for the keynote at the DE forum, but the DE people hadn't heard of her - they went with David Kirk instead.

A comment to this post raises the point that there has been no response so far from DBCDE to anything posted. The blog isn't being used as a way to interact. Before people leap in and defend the public servants here and flag the idea that they aren't meant to have opinions, it is perfectly possible to have a face to face discussion with them. It should be possible to discuss on line. It will be interesting to see if they get to the point of replying to all the filtering posts.

I've also discovered this fragment. I have no idea what twitter is but the point made here is that the feedback form approach is a very limitting way of conducting this discussion.

Finally the official Google blog picked it up. The post was by Carolyn Dalton who has also contributed to the DE blog herself.

Overall it is not a great deal of coverage yet.

Second DE post

2008-12-11T15:39:00.000-08:00

My second DE post to be published has made it to the DBCDE DE blog.

It was actually my third post. The second was to the second topic. It seems to have failed the moderation process. Oh well - whatever....

Post One

2008-12-10T23:25:00.001-08:00

For the record here is my first post on the new DBCDE blog.

I thought I should post the permanent link because you can't find comments for love or money on it.

As I threatened I have posted on each of the following two topics but haven't seen them appear.

Welcome DBCDE

2008-12-10T21:36:00.000-08:00

The blogsphere is an interesting beast, much misunderstood and widely abused. The best of blogging is not just one crazed individual sitting in a corner recording their daily doings and sharing them with the world. The best of blogging picks up on the single most magical element of the web - the hyperlink - and creates a link to multiple sources of content. The very best bloggers are regular cross-commentators.

Blogging has been wrapped up into the generic Web 2.0 definition and aligned with social networking and wikis under the generic heading of "user generated content." Politicians have started using these tools in their election and electoral engagement activities. Corporations have started using them to connect with customers. Examples include blogs by software developers at Microsoft.

Our very own Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy has decided to give this a go with a blog to discuss the Digital Economy. Now the purists would probably claim it is not a blog - it is really a "forum" more like whirlpool. And as a forum it suffers from a number of factors - not least the absence of discussion threads and the lack of a registration process (so you do't know if the two "peter's" are the same).

But they've got some reaction and I'm trying to contribute. My motivation for establishing this blog is to create a place where all my responses to their blog can be housed - because the structure of their blog makes finding specific comments hard.

This blog will morph into a general digital economy blog.