FeedsA fun article by Quentin Dempster in The Australian today, in which he lathers on the moral outrage and argues that it would be better to deprive the ABC of money than get it from evil commerce. Stay vigilant.
In a lengthy essay at Creative Economy, Margaret Simons takes on my criticism of the ABC trying to replicate the already existing commercial and civil society organisations - as well as individuals - that provide ‘town squares’ for public debate. (I spell out my argument here, here and here.)
Simons has two responses. The first is that the ABC could encourage direct conversation between media professionals and the public - unlike private blogs, which she implies lack the ‘professional’ voice. I’m not sure how she squares that view with the now highly influential mainstream commercial journalists who now have widely-read blogs, many of which are very participatory. The idea of collaboration between professionals and audience is one which most commercial organisations are groping towards. So it is hard to see what ‘public good’ that is being under-provided here.
The ABC could certainly offer its journalists the opportunity to blog under its brand, but to my mind, there doesn’t seem to be a good case to change the ABC’s charter or provide significant extra funding to produce participatory content. For somebody who is enthusiastic about the creative potential of the audience, Simons doesn’t seem have much faith in the town squares that the audience create themselves. Civil society is actually pretty resourceful.
The second response is much less convincing. The distaste the ABC supporters have for advertising has always struck me as a first and foremost an aesthetic argument, rather than a policy one. Introducing advertising would certainly favour the production of more popular programs over less popular ones, but surely striving for popularity would be one of the most ‘audience-responsive’ reforms the ABC could make. Anyway, it is hard to see why advertising is ruining the public square.
For this reason, I think Simons is overly cynical when she describes the commercial media as a “shopping mall” - if that’s all our commercial print, radio and television media really is, then there is a lot of good journalism sold in that shopping mall. Certainly, there is tension in the commercial media between the considerations of business and the considerations of journalism, but, all things considered, journalism is doing pretty well.
Simons ends with a call for the ABC’s charter to be revised to be made less prescriptive. The charter could certainly do with some revision, but I would argue it needs to be made stricter, not more open. There are few government funded bodies in Australia that are as undirected and open-ended as the ABC.
If the broadcaster feels that it is being constrained by its charter at the moment, that is certainly not obvious in its activities - I hate to keep harping on about the ABC’s Second Life adventure, but any charter that allows a government department to do something like that is hardly too shackled.
The 80 page Senate Committee report into rude words on television is full of bizarre material. Take for instance Media Standards Australia, which believes that the problem with offensive material isn’t that it offends people, it is that it exists at all:
Sadly, however, the more concerned people do just switch off, the longer the unacceptable levels of offensive material continue unchecked, and uncommented upon. One cannot complain about something that one does not see.
But the Senate committee is not all laughs. One significant regulatory proposal in the report is dumped in at the end of a long discussion on parental responsility - a mandatory “parental lock-out” on all new digital televisions sold in Australia. This sounds similar to the American V-Chip which was made mandatory in new US televisions from 1999 onwards. Read the rest of this entry »
I have a piece contrasting the dynamic investment and innovation on mobile networks with the politicised and sluggish environment created by fixed-line regulations in The Australian today: “Don’t strangle communications networks“
My otherwise reliable webhost neglected to inform me that it was changing the DNS name servers for this site. As a result, this website has been down for about two weeks until I was able to discover the problem.
In the mean time, I had a piece in The Age last Sunday on the ABC’s drifting purpose, “Come on, Aunty, time to work out where you’re at“, which has so far received the bevy of hate mail I am getting used to with these columns.
Michael Duffy was also kind enough to cover my book in a Sydney Morning Herald column: “Small government goes large on red tape to create an industry giant” and I appeared on Radio National’s Counterpoint discussing it shortly after. Interviews which cover my book are of course a right and proper task for the ABC and central to its charter.
But more importantly, the May IPA Review is at the printers now.
If the Expert Taskforce into broadband infrastructure was supposed to delay scrutiny of the government’s broadband policy until after the election, then it isn’t working.
The Taskforce was formed to evaluate proposals for broadband infrastructure roll-out, and assess the regulatory or legislative changes that that may require.
Debate over telecommunications regulation hardly needs its fire stoked. But, oddly, the loudest agitator over the last week has been the communications minister herself.
Helen Coonan has spent the last few days apologising for speculating that the taskforce could recommend the structural separation of Telstra.
And yesterday in the Australian Financial Review she raised the possibility that the government could help pay for a proposal that delivered fibre-optic broadband all the way to the home. This too was quickly retracted. The Minister, a spokesman claimed, was speaking “hypothetically”.
Conspicuously, one option which has been not withdrawn is the potential that the winning broadband proposal will be granted a monopoly over broadband infrastructure. Coonan periodically refers to this possibility in her public addresses and it goes unchallenged. But granting an infrastructure monopoly would stifle competition in the telecommunications industry far more than it is already.
While the Taskforce prepares to receive the first broadband proposals, almost any regulatory change is on the table. But the one thing that the taskforce cannot yield on is the most important and controversial - the requirement that any new network be open to access by competitors at a “non-discriminatory” rate. The taskforce’s job is to devise some regulatory conditions under which a firm would both build the fibre network and share it with competitors.
But it is this sort of mandatory access regulation that has drawn the telecommunications sector into its current regulatory quagmire. Access regulation encourages firms to piggyback on existing infrastructure, rather than competitively build infrastructure themselves.
And fibre-to-the-node will hardly be the last broadband infrastructure Australia ever needs. When the next upgrade inevitably appears on the horizon, mandatory access regulation will still be hampering investment.
Coonan let this cat out of the bag when she raised the possibility of government subsidies for a future, higher-speed network – a tacit admission that she does not believe that the telecommunications industry can manage and fund its own investment while the existing regulatory framework remains.
The Taskforce’s requirement that the new network be open for access by competitors merely demonstrates that the government has learnt little from the failures of telecommunications regulation. To appropriate the Minister’s artless phrase – whatever the Taskforce concludes in February next year, telecommunications regulation will still not be “future-proofed”.
From Crikey
I have a piece up at ABC News Online on one of the battles in the Telstra-Government war - the CDMA network shutdown. “Telco industry’s ‘red tape’ burden unfair“
A piece in The Age with Tim Wilson, on the absurdities of our film classification regime: “Film rating laws out of sync with 21st century“
The Australian Government continued down the slippery slope towards internet censorship yesterday by introducing a bill to give the Australian Federal Police the power to nominate terrorism or crime related websites for filtering.
In The Australian Greens Senator Kerry Nettle expressed concerns that the Police Commissioner might use these new powers to call for Greenpeace’s website to be filtered - which really should raise more questions about the activities of Greenpeace than the value of the legislation.
Nevertheless, there is slightly less to this bill than it seems at first glance. The internet industry code currently governing online content already provides for filtering of pornographic and offensive content. But this filtering is voluntary, not mandatory.
At the moment, internet service providers who want to be designated “family friendly” by the Internet Industry Association have to offer their customers one of a range of approved PC or server side commercial filters. And these filters are periodically updated according to an Australian Communications and Media Authority black list. Yesterday’s bill would merely allow the AFP to add terrorism or crime related sites to that black list. But why would aspiring terrorists and criminals willingly install a family friendly filter onto their PC?
A lot rides on how the Internet Industry Association rewrites its codes of practise in the light of the government’s NetAlert scheme. Under NetAlert, all internet service providers will be compelled to offer consumers the choice between an unfiltered internet connection or a server-side filtered one.
Again, terrorists are unlikely to choose a filtered internet connection. The government’s new legislation only really makes sense if the unfiltered product is not going to be truly “unfiltered”. That the internet content bill was introduced quietly yesterday morning does not inspire confidence that the government plans to leave our internet connections alone. And it’s worth remembering that the Labor Party has for a long time promised mandatory server side filters if they win government.
Quite aside from the internet censorship issue, this bill highlights a disturbing regulatory trend - governments delegating the policing of the internet to the communications industry. Many of the measures canvassed by the inquiry into social networking sites would do just that. Even outside the high-technology sector, counterterrorism and anti money laundering regulation in the financial sector compels firms to police their own customers.
Particularly in the communications sector, these sorts of regulatory burdens can only add to costs for consumers.
From Crikey
I had my fortnightly piece in The Age last Sunday, this time on the NetAlert filtering scheme: “Better to be alert than NetAlarmed“.
The Department of Communications kicked an own goal last week when it released a study of the attitudes of parents and kids. Parents were concerned that the internet exposed children to pornography and was full of strangers and chat rooms. Children were more worried about pop-up ads, viruses and substandard internet speeds. Not surprisingly, few were concerned about pornography. Some expressed concerns about interacting with dangerous strangers.
The study did not provide any support for one of the bulwarks of the Government’s policy — the mandatory internet filter.
Communications Minister Helen Coonan appeared on the Radio National’s ‘The National Interest’ that day to talk about NetAlert - but was conspicuously unable to justify having not released the full findings of the research that the Communications Department commissioned for the policy.
