Month: October 2006

No Net Gain In Beattie Plan

In the fall-out of Telstra abandoning its plans for a national fibre-optic network, Premier Peter Beattie has announced his own plans for super-fast broadband piped directly into Brisbane homes.

But there is much less to this proposal than he makes out.

Beattie’s plan to allow potential investors use of public assets to string fibre-optic cable offers those investors nothing they don’t already have. Infrastructure builders can already use these assets. Beattie expects private companies to foot the bill, but why haven’t they done so already without the Premier’s invitation?

Australia does not rate high on international broadband rankings. This is really the fault of the Federal Government and Beattie’s frustration with the situation is understandable.

Telstra’s fibre-optic plans were cancelled because of federal regulations. Our overzealous competition regulator, the ACCC, insisted that if Telstra built the $4 billion network, then it would be compelled to offer access to that network to its competitors.

The regulator would choose the price and conditions. Telstra’s competitors would bear none of the risk — and in the highly competitive and dynamic telecommunications industry, that risk is extremely high. If the network was successful, Telstra would see its rivals competing with it, using its own freshly built network. If it were unsuccessful, perhaps because newer technologies passed it by, Telstra would have wasted its money.

It is much easier to piggyback off another company’s network at prices set by a regulator than to have to invest in infrastructure yourself. This regulatory problem has not yet been solved.

Beattie’s announcement does nothing to change the underlying disincentives to broadband infrastructure investment. He offers, as a trade for the $550 million investment that he expects the private sector to fork out, access to public assets such as powerlines and sewer pipes. But such supply channels are already available. They do not need the Premier’s agreement for their use.

Nor do commercial businesses need a politician to point out such investment opportunities if indeed they are profitable. If a company declines to build a service, it is a fair bet that either it is uneconomical to do so or an external power, like a competition regulator, has made it uneconomical.

If the business case for investing in the kind of network Beattie would prefer is so obvious, then in all likelihood the network would have already been built.

The Queensland Government is not the only government prioritising access to broadband as an urgent policy matter. Since the Telstra decision, state and federal governments have been working feverishly to develop grand broadband “plans”. Federal Communications Minister Helen Coonan expects to come out with a national broadband strategy next month. The West Australian Government promises to come up with a similar plan to Queensland’s shortly.

High-speed broadband brings about enormous economic and social benefits, but the Queensland Government should be wary of trying to chaperone telecommunications investment into the state. Governments are remarkably ineffective at predicting future technologies and consumer demand. When they try, politics always intervenes.

Earlier this year, the San Francisco council teamed with Google and internet service provider Earthlink to provide blanket wireless broadband coverage across the city, supported by advertising. Inevitably, the negotiations over this have been bogged down in politics and no wireless network has emerged. The two companies have found that running between town hall meetings trying to keep up with political, rather than commercial, demands is more work than was expected.

The San Francisco network, if it ever gets off the ground, will be a snails-pace 300kbps — a speed that the Australian Labor Party decries as “fraudband”.

An earlier citywide wireless broadband network in Orlando, Florida, was shut down in January 2005 when the city realised that only 27 people a day were using the service at a cost to taxpayers of $US1800 a month.

If Beattie’s project goes sour, taxpayers will have to foot the bill or be saddled with a sub-par network. It is not hard to imagine the Government chipping in a few million here or there to seduce investors, as various governments have done in pilot programs around the country. But doing so would invite failure, as countless taxpayer-funded and government-initiated broadband projects around the world have shown. Most end up underutilised or rely on tax money to survive.

The solution to broadband backwardness is not press releases announcing grand “plans”, but comprehensive regulatory reform. If the State Government wants Brisbane to have access to new high-speed networks, they would be better to work with the Federal Government to lower the obstacles to investment nationally.

Only removing the disincentives to investment stemming from the ACCC will allow Australian consumers to get the broadband they deserve.

Media-Rule Horse Has Bolted

Communications Minister Helen Coonan’s attempts at policy reform have so far been conspicuous failures. Telstra’s fibre to the node network was scuttled by her requirement that Telstra build it and then give control over it to the regulator. And now what was already a timid “media reform” package has been watered down almost to the level of pointlessness.

The coalition’s proposed changes to media laws were obsolete on the day they were released. They were an attempt to deal policy into the frenzied technological change taking place in the unregulated parts of the media and telecommunications sector.

In March, the day the government released its media discussion paper, Apple released for download and purchase on its iTunes service High School Musical. The movie has been a huge success with the “tween” market (children between the ages of eight and 12). It cannot be seen at the cinemas, it’s available only on DVD and via the internet. Movie distributors had learnt the lesson from music distributors’ failure half a decade ago – consumers are migrating their entertainment onto the internet, and are happy to pay for the privilege.

This week we saw the final watering down of the media package and the sale of YouTube to Google – $US1.65 billion ($2.2 billion) for 67 employees and a website.

None of Apple, YouTube, Google or Microsoft made submissions or appeared at the Senate inquiry into the government’s media legislation. Telstra gave evidence only about the mobile television licence. These companies didn’t need to get involved in debates about old media. No reform package can stop the migration of consumers from traditional media into more exciting and more flexible formats.

Now, with the release of Telstra’s Next G network, the transition from old to new media is firmly under way. Certainly, the wireless network is slower than the scuttled fibre to the node network, but it doesn’t take much to happily stream a YouTube video onto a mobile phone. Next G speeds are already faster than those that many consumers have piped into their home, and are set to increase in speed tenfold.

When Prime Minister John Howard says media reform is only a second-order priority, he is more prescient than he realises. The creative storms of change will blow no matter what is in the Broadcasting Services Act.

The Holy Grail of modern communications has long been obvious: high-speed internet. If this is available on mobile devices, consumers can watch video from any service, read their email from any provider and browse any website with the same freedom they have in front of their computers at home. But Australia has a regulatory environment dramatically at odds with technological and cultural developments here and overseas.

What was the debate about? The “diversity” cry rings hollow – on the internet, an infinite array of content and opinion is available to anybody who cares to look. Online media services, still in their infancy, can deliver more diverse content than can be consumed in a lifetime.

But political debate about media ownership always ends up with politicians pontificating about the relative merits of media content. Genuine deregulation means that this decision would be made entirely by consumers. In a deregulated market, what people want on television or radio, people get.

By forcing local radio stations to broadcast a minimum of local content, the politicians say they know better than consumers what should be broadcast. It is an attempt to force consumers to pay for politicians’ public visibility – elsewhere this would be called corruption. By restricting the ability for stations to respond to consumer demand, the reform package condemns many independent broadcasters to failure.

Local media produces niche products that can be supplied by other vehicles. Whether product is supplied on the same radio transmitter as 50 years ago, or a podcast inaugurated 50 days ago, should be of no concern to legislators.

Outside the realm of government regulation, we have innovative, dynamic companies responsive to market demand. Within its reach, we have an industry being variously protected and attacked by flawed public policy and political manoeuvring. Unsurprisingly, audiences for unregulated new media are growing faster.

Traditional media still have a role. But when the government imposes new regulations and fails to strip away the old ones, that role is looking more and more perilous.

Being creative has never been “un-Australian”

Holden’s blimp over the MCG during the AFL Grand Final might have upset Toyota, the AFL’s official sponsor, but it was hardly “un-Australian” marketing.

Holden saw a captive audience of thousands at the MCG, and took the opportunity to market to them. Since when has it been “un-Australian” to be creative? Holden was simply using public airspace to advertise its product and it broke no laws in doing so.

Cricket Australia are thinking about asking the government for legislation to stop the same thing happening during the Ashes. But is it the role of government to protect advertisers from other advertisers?

Even less is it the role of government to hand over an asset — in this case the rights to airspace — to an advertiser for free.

The solution lies in property rights. If advertisers wanted to stop competitors from flying giant blimps over their events they should pay to buy the airspace.

As it stands, the air has been designated by the government as a public asset, rather than property, and Holden has every right to fly through it. In a truly free-market economy, organisations and individuals would be able to purchase or lease the rights to airspace and utilise it in whatever way they chose.

There already exists a wide range of legislation designed to protect against many forms of ambush marking. The Trade Practices Act protects against ambushing companies engaging in deceptive or misleading conduct, or falsely representing sponsorship deals. Holden did none of these things.

“Ambush marketing” is the market in action. And it’s kind of funny.

In search of Smith’s legacy

Review of Adam Smith and the pursuit of perfect liberty, by James Buchan (Profile Books, 2006, 288 pages)

If an economic philosopher is to be judged by his sound bites, then Adam Smith’s best lines come not from his great masterpieces, but from a paper delivered in 1755, as reported by a friend:

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice.

All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.

Twenty years later, his masterwork An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations would contain nothing so radical. James Buchan’s short intellectual biography of Adam Smith pivots around the publication of his Wealth of Nations and the earlier The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Spartanly but engagingly written, Buchan depicts an Adam Smith cursed by ill-health for his whole life. The racy novelist Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, who befriended him while he stayed in France, described him as ‘ugly as a devil’ – she hated his voice and found him terribly absent-minded, but loved his sentimental philosophy.

Buchan describes in his introduction how both sides of politics have tried to claim themselves as the heirs of Adam Smith – long adored by the free-market right, reform-minded Social Democrats now try to co-opt his legacy. Buchan chastises both Alan Greenspan and Gordon Brown for inappropriately calling upon Smith’s ghost, but it would be interesting to see where the biographer ultimately stands on this.

Certainly Smith was not a dogmatic libertarian by modern standards. He saw a role for the State in education, if under a peculiar justification. The division of labour, he worried, would make the poor into specialised idiots, men who were ‘mutilated and deformed’. Public education would help alleviate their intellectual isolation, and lower the chances that their minds could be corrupted by the baser elements of political thought. He had a remarkably unenlightened view of women, but subsequent feminist authors made much of his theories by applying them more equitably.

Buchan rightly makes note of the misuse of what has wrongly become Smith’s signature term ‘the invisible hand’. Indeed, the ‘invisible hand’ was rarely used in Smith’s writings, only once in each of the Wealth of Nations and The Theory. An out-of-context quotation from the Wealth of Nations has imparted upon it the meaning it has for modern commentators: an economic actor is ‘led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.’ Smith, in this case, is talking about merchants who choose to store their wealth at home rather than overseas for security purposes, and therefore raise the aggregate wealth of their home nation.

However misquoted or misunderstood, the ‘invisible hand’ has since become the universal metaphor for the workings of a free market. Buchan notes that while Adam Smith was not a particularly religious man, his metaphor helped illuminate his message to his students, most of whom were training for religious careers. The Theory is peppered with such references: Smith refers to the Great Superintendent, the Great Conductor, Benevolent Nature and the Superintendent of the Universe.

But, co-opted by economics teachers as a metaphor for Hayekian spontaneous order, its use just about gives the game away. If all that is required to shift resources efficiently throughout an economy is an omniscient designing mind, could not a sufficiently enlightened public servant, equipped with the best technology and intellectual expertise, do well enough to make it worth trying? But it is the process of voluntary exchange that creates the order of a market, and without perfect omniscience, no planner could replicate its results.

While the metaphor holds, it also leads to unfortunate hubris on the part of planners who presume to replicate the invisible hand with their visible fist.

A short postscript he wrote for his friend David Hume’s autobiography, who had attacked the religious sensitivities of establishment England at the time, caused Smith much greater problems than the Wealth of Nations, which had attacked the entire British commercial system. Buchan’s brief overview of Smith’s life gives us an engaging account of this man whose greatest work is now gathering the controversy it deserves.