Month: June 2007

On Telecoms, Regulator Chuting Blanks

With Alan Moran

Far from a success of public policy, the $1 billion rural broadband subsidy won by Optus and Elders demonstrates once again the failure of the competition regulation.

Ever since Optus and Telstra rolled out similar cable networks in the mid-1990s, wasteful duplication has been the bogyman of telecommunications investment. Companies wield the term like a weapon when they want to avoid having to invest in their own infrastructure and, unfortunately, politicians listen.

This stands in contrast to the duplicated roll-out of Safeway/Coles supermarkets and the rival brand petrol stations located next to each other. Duplication in these cases is applauded as competition.

The roll-out of cable was one in which two private businesses went head-on for customers — just as we see competing supermarkets at every shopping centre and bowsers along every major strip. This is genuine competition and investment with shareholders’ funds.

By contrast, the latest Optus proposal to roll out broadband to rural areas is one that will be bankrolled by the taxpayer.

Broadband policy has, in the past few months, become highly politicised. For people who use the internet to watch high-definition movies, the ALP’s $4.7 billion fibre proposal would bring all their Christmases at once. But the cost to the taxpayer is daunting, especially considering that a private company, Telstra, is desperate to pay for the network itself.

The Coalition’s plan is an attempt to cobble together the wide variety of longstanding subsidies to rural broadband users. Communications Minister Helen Coonan has put herself into the uncomfortable position of defending the merits of specific technologies — the sort of “winner picking” that has long discredited national industry policies.

But broadband roll-out in Australia has been absurdist theatre since well before this year. And the Optus plan brings this theatre into sharp relief.

Most of the attention has been focused on choice of technology. Telstra claims the WiMAX standard won’t work as advertised. But, while WiMAX will provide the Optus/Elders network with a link to the most remote Australians, much of their plan rests on the wireline technology ADSL2+, an upgrade of the widely used ADSL.

In contrast to the cable roll-out, or competition between supermarkets, this is taxpayer-funded duplication. Telstra, with its own shareholders’ money, already has installed its ADSL2+ network in exchanges around the country.

Telstra will not switch its network in areas in which it is the only service available. For instance, in Tasmania Telstra has installed ADSL2+ in more than 100 exchanges. But only three of these have been switched on. This scenario is repeated across the country.

To Telstra, switching on the network risks its appropriation by the ACCC. The regulator would force it to be provided to other businesses at an artificially low price.

There are several competing telecommunications networks in Australia, wireline and wireless, but the ACCC sees the spectre of monopoly and the possibility of regulation everywhere.

Expropriating the value for innovatory business activity or new investment is a sure-fire way of stopping such activity.

Australia is facing deficiencies in infrastructure development in areas beyond telecommunications — rail and port services being the other hot spots. In all cases the investment shortfall can be traced back to regulatory impediments.

This is the outcome of a flawed competition law, compounded by poor administration of the law both politically and bureaucratically.

The answer is radical reform. The existing regulatory framework punishes entrepreneurial investments that bring a new or improved service.

We don’t regulate manufacturing plants or processes in this way. We don’t regulate such innovations in software. We resist the temptation in those areas for very good reasons — regulating them would grind down the economy’s productivity.

We should cease regulating new investments in infrastructure unless we want to see the economy falling behind in technology and capacity.

In telecommunications this is extremely important — the pace of technological change far outstrips the plodding feet of the regulator.

Today the conversation is about WiMAX and fibre to the node, but when the next, inevitable, upgrade is necessary, it will again be regulation that is holding investment back.

Media Faces An Unsentimental Future

Media critics have made careers proclaiming how dangerous media moguls are for Australian democracy. These critics now face an even more serious problem – no media moguls.

If PBL Media – which private equity now controls- is anything to go by, we may see nameless, faceless, investors replace these personalities.

Private equity firms may be nameless and faceless, but they are ruthless. CVC Capital Partners has already torn out the symbolic heart of the PBL empire, Alan Jones. The relationship between Jones and the late Kerry Packer was not atypical – the journalist under the mogul’s patronage.

Press critic A. J. Liebling wrote that few journalists under William Randolph Hearst’s tutelage would be employable elsewhere.

The Bulletin has long been made viable by a tacit acceptance of its unprofitability and its prestige as Australia’s oldest magazine. But sentimentality, as Jones and his audience have learned, is not a defining characteristic of private equity firms. CVC will be looking closely atThe Bulletin.

Private equity groups act when they see a company with good but underutilised assets. They assume a big risk. To make this risk pay off, private equity needs to cut fat and make money. Typically, after a few years they exit, selling a more efficient company for an enormous profit.

If this is CVC’s game plan, it picked a great time to get into the media industry. CVC has given itself a five to seven-year window. But by then, PBL Media will not just have to be a streamlined organisation, it will have to be radically different, if it is to keep up with the radical changes in the form and content that media consumers demand.

It took only 18 months for YouTube to go from a garage to a $US1.65 billion ($A1.96 billion) Google acquisition, during which the user-uploaded video website had firmly implanted itself in media consumption habits around the world.

The search giant quickly moved on to an even bigger acquisition this year, buying advertising outfit DoubleClick for $US3.1 billion.

The business of the media is to connect eyeballs with advertising. YouTube and DoubleClick present new competitive pressures on companies that depend on both. Given the pace of online innovation, how these companies will affect the market for media content is unknown.

Corporate responses to these changes have been mixed. In the US, the media empires have already begun dramatically overhauling their structure and, in many cases, spinning off subsidiaries.

It is far easier to point out failed attempts to modernise businesses than successes. The merger between America Online and TimeWarner, which was greeted by the US commentariat with fear and awe, is now an embarrassing failure.

In part, the struggle with modernisation is due to the dramatic internal and philosophical changes required. For instance, Google’s project to index all the information in the world forces media companies to rethink rapidly their relationship with their own content and the value received from it. The chief executive of Macmillan book publishing this month demonstrated his confusion of the issues underlying new media by swiping two laptops from the Google stall at a publisher’s expo.

Google Book Search has been indexing his company’s books under the US “fair use” copyright exception. But rather than giving Google “a taste of its own medicine”, the incident was a cringe-inducing display of the chasm between “new” media and the old. The CEO was devoted to the traditional business model on which his company was founded decades before. Hopefully, as we move towards private equity, similar attitudes in Australian companies will be jettisoned. The regulatory framework that has controlled the broadcasting sector for the past 50 years, for instance, has been a complex web of protectionism, restriction and government favours.

Relationships between press barons and governments have dominated Australian public policy. But private equity groups have few political aspirations – their only aim is to make money.

Politicians who have been used to trading favours with media moguls may have to adjust to a press less interested in politicking and more interested in marketing. CVC hopes to make a big profit out of PBL Media. To do so, PBL Media will not only have to be lean and efficient, but comfortable competing with all-new competitors in an all-new space.

A. J. Liebling once wrote: “The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role in society is to make money.” When private equity owns media, it hopefully can do both.