Yeah, blogging hasn’t happened since Christmas. This hasn’t been to to a lack of things to blog about - merely a lack of willpower to do so. I’ve been on holidays, damnit.

So lets catch up. Most importantly, I had a spat with the head of the ACCC, Graeme Samuel. In response to a proposal by the ACCC to regulate sporting broadcast rights, I submitted an opinion piece in The Age - and it got in, because the opinion page of The Age is desperate for people like me to submit things, I guess.

The piece is here: There can never be too much sport, Mr Samuel. I assume the link will go down eventually, so here is an alternative link at the IPA website.

They cut some of my… um… rhetorical excesses. But the guts are there.

He responded on the letters page a few days later, which I reprint here. (Copyright be damned)

Chris Berg (Opinion, 28/1) rightly recognises that telecommunications providers require content to induce customers to sign up.

The idea is that consumers get better value from their internet and mobile phone packages when the packages include access to sports and other compelling content. But this is also the essence of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s concerns about competition between communications infrastructure providers.

If Telstra locks up all the available content, only Telstra customers will have access to it. That not only limits the general availability of the content but has the potential to deter competitors from investing in the new technologies that can be used to make it available, such as 3G mobile and DSL internet networks. This in turn means that consumers will have fewer choices as to which provider they use for not only content, but the phone and internet services that are typically bundled together with it.

While there might be sound commercial reasons why content owners seek to contract exclusively, it is the ACCC’s job to ascertain whether particular matters have this substantive anti-competitive effect.

Needless to say, I disagree. I sent in a further response letter to the Age after that, but it didn’t get in. My fame can only get me so far, it seems.