Tag: telecommunications

The Net Is Anarchy: Keep It That Way

The internet, long seen as a neutral realm free of government interference, is now hot political property. Not surprisingly, therefore, both the European Union and the United Nations are now trying to grab control of the internet. This has major consequences for business and for individuals.

Since 1998, a non-profit organisation named ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has been responsible for managing and coordinating the internet’s domain names. ICANN ensures that what is typed in the address bar matches the site trying to be accessed. Such an organisation is necessary to ensure the stability and growth of the internet.

At the moment, the internet is an ungoverned, unregulated, anarchic medium – merely a mutual agreement between computer users all around the world to connect to each other in a certain way. Given this blank slate, business and innovation has thrived online. Business to business commerce has exploded over the past few years. In Australia, 31 per cent of businesses reported placing orders over the internet in 2004. This will grow as business uptake of broadband intensifies.

Until now, ICANN’s role has been merely to facilitate and smooth this explosion of internet activity.

The European Union, as well as a motley collection of less-than-democratic nations such as Iran, Cuba and China, are forcefully trying to replace ICANN with an as-yet-unspecified UN department. Such a proposal will be under consideration at the United Nations Working Group on Internet Governance meeting next month in Tunis.

Arguing that the internet is a global resource, the European Union insists that the private sector must share its responsibility of overseeing it with the UN.

By ceding this power over to governments, every aspect of the anarchic freedom that the internet represents is under threat. The UN wants to use the internet’s structure to pursue specific goals – to close the “digital divide” and to “harness the potential of information” for the world’s impoverished.

But the inequalities the UN claims it wants to overcome stem not from the internet itself, but from government policy. Syria has even advocated taxing domain names to subsidise an international universal service right.

No matter how hard the new UN body will try to reverse the “digital divide” by reallocating domain names and shifting the location of servers, the only way that internet uptake can be increased internationally is through action within the countries themselves.

That is, the same way any technological advance has filtered down to the poorer countries. By building stable institutions, maximising economic freedom, and ensuring prosperity, which creates consumer demand. No amount of political action by the UN can replace this process.

The defining characteristic of the internet is not intelligence or its capacity to fulfil specific aims, but its simplicity. It is a “dumb” medium, which is only structurally suited to transmitting data from one computer to another. It can’t conduct public policy.

Businesses and individuals have come to rely on the internet to carry out their personal and commercial interactions. UN control threatens this.

What this new bureaucracy would clearly be able to do is restrict and censor websites and addresses, as well as place heavy regulatory burdens on their authentication, maintenance and pricing structure. This is a prospect no doubt relished by European social democrats who would like to extend their national content and industry policies across national borders.

Consider the countries most actively pushing for the UN takeover. Leading the charge is Iran, with Saudi Arabia, China, Cuba and Venezuela hot on its heels. None of these nations is known for their promotion of political, economic or social freedoms. Iran bans more than 10,000 websites on charges of immorality, and jails journalists and bloggers who disagree with the ruling elite. The “Great Firewall of China” has a similar effect.

Should the internet be under the control of a network of regulators hammering out compromises about what is and isn’t proper online activity? Member states in the UN run the gamut from the totalitarian to the democratic. Any attempt to assert control will result in an approach contrary to the liberal democratic ideals that dominate online activity.

The internet needs the technicians of ICANN, not the policy committees of the UN.

Broadband: Another Telco Monopoly Would Be A Disaster

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”.

Telco Industry’s ‘Red Tape’ Burden Unfair

The telecommunications industry has never been as politicised as it is in 2007.

As a result of the ongoing fight between the Federal Government and Telstra over broadband regulation, there are few of Telstra’s business decisions that aren’t immediately pounced upon by politicians trying to gather potential votes.

One new target in this seemingly eternal stoush is Telstra’s migration of its rural customers off its CDMA mobile telephone network, and onto the highly publicised Next G service.

Next G was launched in November 2005, and provides customers with a far superior service than the ageing CDMA network due to be switched off in January next year.

But doing so isn’t that simple.

Communications Minister Helen Coonan and the Attorney General Philip Ruddock have argued that Telstra should be prevented from making the switch until the Next G network provides at least the equivalent coverage of the existing CDMA network.

The Government has imposed an additional licence condition upon Telstra to that effect.

However, Telstra argues that that level of coverage will be achieved later this month and therefore the new licence condition is redundant.

With so many marginal seats in rural areas, that the Federal Government would be paying attention to a new mobile network in the bush is not surprising. But, by imposing a new condition on Telstra’s CDMA licence, it indicates a willingness to intervene opportunistically in the affairs of a private sector company for political gain.

The Government has preached at length about the need to cut ‘red tape’, but its continued regulation-making demonstrates that it is merely rhetoric.

The telecommunications industry has one of the highest regulatory burdens in the Australian economy. The pages of legislation governing the sector has grown from 1,600 ten years ago to over 10,000 today.

For Telstra, this constitutes nearly 500 regulatory reports to government agencies a year. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which manages much of this regulation, has itself doubled in size since 1999.

Regulation diverts firms away from productive activity. And the telecommunications industry is awash with regulatory affairs managers, communications and policy directors, consultants and lobbyists.

There are few sectors of the economy that require more innovation and flexibility than the technology sector. But instead, the future of Australian telecommunications services is vested with governments and regulators, who operate at glacial speed.

When they do finally act, they frequently misunderstand the nature of what they are regulating, or act only to please political constituencies, or even act just to justify their own existence.

It is hard enough for the industry to keep up with Australian consumers’ insatiable demand for new technologies. So when it is deeply intertwined with politics and regulation, it is doubly unable keep up.

But taking a long-term view, this episode illustrates a major policy issue that the telecommunications sector has to grapple with.

The radio-frequency spectrum licences that are necessary to operate a mobile network like Next G or CDMA are ultimately controlled by regulators and the Government, not the firms which actually operate the networks.

This government control of spectrum licences leaves telecommunications firms susceptible to political manipulation. Spectrum management has, since its last major reform in 1992, been overhauled to allow for greater flexibility and ‘ownership’ of spectrum licences by firms.

As Senator Coonan has bluntly shown, these licences still have a long way to go until they can be free of arbitrary government intervention.

Governments need only to follow due process – Telstra alleges that the Communications Minister in this case has not – and they can alter the terms of those licences at their whim.

Licence holders are exposed to the political calculations of the government of the day.

Ideally, firms which held spectrum licences would be able to use those licences as they saw fit and make business decisions about how best to serve their customers.

But in an election year, and in an industry that is highly politicised and highly regulated, that ideal is still far away.

Regretting Privatisation: Broadband and the 2007 election

Telstra was sold barely a year ago, but both major parties want to bring the government back into the telecommunications infrastructure game.

The Federal Government has responded to its own failure to reform the decade-old regulatory framework for telecommunications with an array of subsidies and initiatives to introduce high-speed broadband networks. In response, the Labor Party dangles in front of voters a $4.7 billion high speed fibre-optic network.

Both parties are trying to make political capital out of the regulatory quagmire which government action has created for the telecommunications industry. But their proposals offer far less than substantive regulatory change could, and they offer it at a much greater cost to taxpayers.

How broadband became an election issue

A decade is a long time in the communications industry.

In 1997, the ABS reported that barely 300,000 Australians subscribed to Internet connections. In 2007, that figure is now six-and-a-half million. (The number of actual users is far higher. With modern networking hardware not widely available a decade ago, many people share Internet access in the household or workplace.)

With the limited speeds offered by dialup technologies, accessing video and audio was then idle futurism. Today, some estimates place video and audio downloads at 90 per cent of traffic.

Nevertheless, the regulatory framework which was developed in 1997 to govern the industry remains the same regulatory framework governing the industry in 2007. While technology and consumption patterns are almost unrecognisable a decade later, the regulation hasn’t budged.

This regulatory framework was designed to encourage the competitive provision of telecommunications using the legacy infrastructure owned by Telstra. By purchasing capacity from the infrastructure owner, competitors could share the network, introducing competition where previously there was none, and without the need for competitors to build their own network from scratch. The approach favoured by regulators under such a framework is to encourage competitors first to resell Telstra’s products, and then progressively to install hardware into the network to compete with the dominant telco.

With carefully regulated access prices, this ‘ladder of investment’ is designed to encourage both competitors and incumbents to invest in infrastructure—the former in order to siphon off some of the market share of the incumbent; the latter to invest to stave off hungry competitors.

The high level of competition for basic internet and telephony service attests to the success — at least on one metric — of this regulatory model. Indeed, at one time, there were more than 600 internet service providers (ISPs) in Australia.

But a mere two dozen of those have had more than 10,000 customers, and competition is not merely a synonym for ‘lots of companies’. Most Australian ISPs are small shoestring operations — reliant on regulated access prices for reselling Telstra services, and highly prone to failure. This segment of the industry looks like a caricature of the economic models of ‘perfect competition’ — hundreds of companies, prices down to marginal cost, and homogenous products.

Nevertheless, the structure of the market is not the most significant flaw in the existing regulatory framework. Critically, the ‘ladder of investment’ theory is unable to deal with major shifts in technology. When it becomes time to move beyond the legacy copper-wire network — the need for a fibre-optic network in Australia is manifestly clear — access regulations are unable to encour-age the creatively destructive investments required.

After all, regulators have encouraged firms to invest further and further into the existing Telstra infrastructure. These firms rely on a specific regulatory framework to provide them with a business model. Furthermore, the prospect of entirely new networks threatens their existing hardware investments — a fibre-optic network may strand a firm’s assets, or at the very least provide unwelcome competitive pressures. Understandably, these firms resist any proposed change to the telecommunications access regime.

The ‘ladder of investment’ may encourage investment up the ladder, but it discourages investment in alternative ladders. There have been indications that this framework was distorting investment for some time. Optus had been migrating customers off its own cable network and on to the Telstra network when the regulated access price turned in its favour. Fearful of having its service declared by regulators as open access, Telstra is only turning on its recently upgraded high-speed ADSL2+ equipment in areas where there is investment from competitors — in Tasmania, for example, the telco has installed ADSL2+ in more than 100 telephone exchanges, but has switched it on in only three.

But the big evidence came in a flurry of controversy last year. The impasse between the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) and Telstra late last year over the access price for their proposed fibre-to-the-node network pivoted around the application of the regulatory framework to new infrastructure investments.

The fact that the two organisations could not come to an agreement (Telstra very publicly announced that it was scrapping its plans to build a new network) should have provided federal policymakers with a very clear indication that the decade-old regulations had finally collapsed.Unfortunately for taxpayers, this was not to be the case. Instead of reform, the political reaction to this regulatory failure has been to propose subsidies, grants, programmes, initiatives and plans. Worse — all of the proposals on the table would increase government involvement in communications investment, not decrease it.

With the ink barely dry on the full sale of Telstra, das broadband problem has politicians wanting to try their hand again at managing the telecommunications industry.

Picking winners, 2007 style

When Communications Minister Helen Coonan announced a one billion dollar award to an Optus–Elders consortium (dubbed ‘Opel’) to deploy a WiMAX wireless network for regional and rural broadband, she had to defend the technology against its legion of critics.

WiMAX is a successor technology to the WiFi standard that is common in home internet networks. In optimal conditions — that is, with access to the right licensed spectrum band, and in the best geographic and environmental circumstances—the technology can deliver broadband speeds at distances of up to ten or fifteen kilometres, wirelessly from the base station.

However, WiMAX’s reputation has suffered from over-hype. Early enthusiasts proclaimed a range of seventy kilometres, and when the technology failed to deliver even half of that, cynicism about its capabilities crept in.

The Communications Minister has not avoided this trap. Releasing maps of the coverage of the Opel network, the Government has assumed a range of 20 kilometres, with a ‘possible’ further 5 kilometres, a much further distance than the broadband is likely to be available.

Two other factors work against the network’s favour. First, the Opel network will deploy a ‘fixed’ WiMAX network, which is being superseded by the superior ‘mobile’ WiMAX technology. Second, such range is only possible on licensed spectrum, to which the Opel network does not currently have access. WiMAX operating on unlicensed spectrum has to compete with a range of consumer technologies such as home wireless phones, private radio transmitters, garage door openers, and so on.

Given these problems, a more likely range for the WiMAX deployments would be in the region of five to ten kilometres. To be uncharitable, when considering environmental and topographical factors, a maximum range of as little as one or two kilometres is entirely possible.

When the maps of WiMAX coverage that were paraded around by the Communications Minister after the Opel announcement are redrawn with a more realistic range, the difference is stark.

Figures 1 to 4 illustrate this difference in two marginal electorates — Gippsland in rural Victoria, and Wakefield in northern Adelaide. (In an election year, electorates are always the most appropriate unit of measurement.) Figures 1 and 2 are the maps produced by the Department of Communications, which assume a twenty kilometre range with a possible added 5 kilometres for the WiMAX network. Figures 3 and 4 depict what the coverage would be like when we assume a more realistic, but still charitable, range of ten kilometres. In both cases, what appeared to be blanket coverage is now revealed as relatively spartan.

A range of ten kilometres may still be too optimistic. Many WiMAX experts predict even less—down to five, or even one or two kilometres. Experience with a similar technology used by the wireless ISP Unwired in Sydney gives little hope. That the likely range of a wireless network could be overestimated is certainly not unique. A firm competing in an open market that found its network was under performing would merely deploy more towers or upgrade to a better technology. But when the source of funding is public dollars, it should be of some concern.

As these maps make clear, it is highly unlikely that the one billion dollar grant for rural broadband will produce the services advertised.

There is one further core problem with the Federal Government’s rural broadband proposal. While the choice of WiMAX has been the major public focus, the Opel plan also relies on widespread ADSL2+ installations. (For instance, Omeo in Gippsland will be serviced by ADSL2+, rather than WiMAX.) However, as we have seen above, Telstra has deployed ADSL2+ in hundreds of exchanges, but because of the risk of regulatory appropriation, has not switched it on until there has been competing investment.

It is yet another striking demon-stration of the perversity of the regulatory framework that governs the sector: once Opel has installed its equipment in exchanges around the country, and as a result Telstra feels free to switch its equipment on, taxpayers will have paid to build duplicated infrastructure.

Broadband to urban areas is to be dealt with separately, and a taskforce set up by the Government has released guidelines for firms applying to build a network. Applicants have until April to apply, and can specify any necessary regulatory changes required. The minister has gone so far as to suggest that one possible regulatory change would be to grant an infrastructure monopoly to the successful firm to protect it from competition, something which would resemble the legislative monopolies that have characterised Australia’s economic history for most of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, one of the core guidelines recommended by the taskforce is the maintenance of an ‘open access’ regime.

It is clear that few lessons have been drawn from the failures of access regulation in the telecommunications sector.

‘Well, we could just pay for the damn thing ourselves’

While the federal government has provided the most detailed plans, they were beaten to the punch by the ALP. In March, the Federal Labor Party announced its solution to the broadband problem — a $4.7 billion grant to build a national fibre-optic broadband network. Specifically, the ALP proposes a fibre-to-the-node network, which is the same sort of network that Telstra proposed and then abandoned six months earlier.

There is a degree of irony when con-sidering the source of the $4.7 billion. $2.7 billion will come out of existing communications funds—a legacy of the more than a dozen broadband infrastructure programmes of the Howard Government’s last five years. But the remaining two billion dollars will be drawn from the Future Fund, itself a result of the sale of Telstra. Telstra is, as the country’s biggest telecommunications infrastructure providers, likely to be a big contender for the grant. The ALP proposal may return to Telstra the proceeds of its own sale.

But less facetiously, it is hard to justify the use of taxpayer money to build a network that the private sector — in this case, Telstra — was desperate to build itself. And instead of regulatory reform, both the ALP proposal and the Federal Government’s proposal lock the telecommunications sector back into a cycle of government investment and regulated access.

To appropriate the graceless expression made famous by the Communications Minister, neither proposal adequately ‘future-proofs’ the communications sector. When the next inevitable infrastructure upgrade is faced — fibre-to-the-node is hardly the last communications network that will be built in Australia — the same regulatory challenges will arise, unless a more comprehensive and ‘future’ orientated reform is pursued.

As Alan Moran and Warren Pengilley have demonstrated in their recent Institute of Public Affairs monograph, Regulation of Infrastructure: Its Development and Consequences, telecommunications is hardly alone in suffering from inappropriate access regulation. Ports, gas, airports, electricity and railroads have all been negatively affected by infrastructure regulation which grants competitors access to their networks at a regulated price.

In telecommunications, a regulatory framework that includes a disincentive to invest is particularly damaging — technological change requires continuous investment. Broadband in Australia is less than it could be, not because the federal government has failed to assume responsibility for its infrastructure, but because it refuses to reform obsolete regulations that hold private investment back. Bringing the government back into the telecommunications market is no solution.

Dealing With That $30,000 Phone Bill… Without Regulation

There is a “mounting dossier” of complaints to communications regulators concerning unexpectedly high mobile phone bills, reports the Australian Financial Review today.

It’s hard to be too sympathetic with somebody who couldn’t figure out they had spent nearly $30,000 in a single month – they must now have an extraordinary library of downloaded ring tones.

But this surge in complaints is partly due to technological convergence. As mobile phones increasingly provide the same sort of internet connection that consumers are used to at home, those consumers expect it to be just as accessibly priced.

Unexpectedly high bills were the subject of a high-profile Australian Communications Authority investigation in 2004. The services the ACA fingered as culprits less than three years ago, MMS and subscription services, are strikingly different from those now. In 2007, it is mobile data and download services on 3G handsets that are at fault.

The industry ombudsman says that complaints over high bills have increased thirty percent over the last year.

Mobile providers need to develop processes to deal with the high account activity that leads to these extraordinarily high bills. Neither the consumer nor the firm is helped by the sudden appearance of a multi-thousand dollar debt.

Firms offering home broadband services have dealt with the unexpectedly high bill problem before. Early plans punished consumers with high ‘excess’ data prices, but now most firms have structured their prices to ‘shape’ data to a lower speed once consumers reach a certain limit.

This is a model that the mobile industry may be able to adopt. Indeed, some major mobile carriers apply hard caps to a range of premium services.

Furthermore, in the United States, the iPhone / AT&T deal offers unlimited data plans, which may indicate that the price of mobile data is trending towards zero. Certainly, in Australia mobile data is now much cheaper than it was when the only technology available was GPRS on a standard GSM phone. And some Blackberry plans offer unlimited email data already.

Horror stories like those in the AFR today tend to encourage regulatory responses. In this case, legislators should be wary of knee-jerk reactions – mandating specific pricing models for high data usage could raise prices for consumers across the board.

Instead, the phenomenon of unexpectedly high mobile bills simply illustrates how the communications industry needs to adjust their business models to changes in technology and consumer demand.

Splitting Telstra Is Not The Right Move

Last week, the US Federal Communications Commission abandoned its decade-long experiment with forced access sharing. Under this process the four so-called “baby bell” phone companies were required to open their phone lines to competing broadband retailers, rather like Telstra’s ADSL must be opened to its rivals.

As the former chief executive of US West, the baby bell that served the US Midwest, Sol Trujillo is intimately aware of the harmful effects that forced access policies have on telecommunications services. In the name of competition, access requirements also disingenuously known as unbundling make an entire industry subservient to regulators, rather than the market and consumers.

Telstra’s last attempt to change prices for high-speed internet, involving the introduction of the entry level $30 per month price early last year, was subject to vigorous action by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and Telstra’s retail rivals seeking to have the price increased.

This was punishing the customer to preserve the competitors and was just as odious as the policies that US regulators have unanimously decided are harmful to true telecommunications competition.

Telstra’s decision last year to lower the cost of home broadband should have been welcomed around the country. Instead, a pricing arrangement which resulted in a massive surge in ADSL uptake was greeted with threats of a multimillion-dollar fine and a brutal series of condemnations in the press.

Telstra’s basic broadband pricing has not changed in 1 1/2 years, probably as the result of lessons learnt from last year’s ugly fight. Such stagnant pricing in such a dynamic sector is not the sign of healthy competition.

The most harmful effect of forced access regulation is on infrastructure. The telecommunications market does not have the same stability as electricity or water; the steady progression of new communication technologies requires significant infrastructure investments to meet consumer demands.

It is clear that allowing competitors to leech off Telstra’s copper wire network at a nominal rate that ensures their profitability, means that there are poor incentives to invest in newer, more advanced infrastructure.

To argue that the capital required to build such a network is so large that no company would possibly do so is fallacious. One need only look at the sudden explosion in aviation competition with the advent of Virgin Airlines to recognise this fact.

In telecommunications we can be confident that this will emerge in the US now that price shackling has been abandoned. Not only do the existing regulations dissuade young competitors from developing new services, but they give Telstra a significant disincentive to upgrade lines. This point was made clear in a Senate committee earlier this year in a discussion on comparable broadband speed.

Telstra’s reluctance to roll out fibre optic cable to the home a technology which will rocket broadband speeds to among the best in the world is based not upon a lack of desire to do so, but a fear that the ACCC will force the company to open its lines at a rate which could make the roll-out a poor investment.

This is the regulatory environment Trujillo faced in the US, and this is the one he faces in Australia right now. However the recent developments here have not followed the positive developments in the America.

While recent Australian debate has focused on the National’s rent-seeking demands for future-proofing, it is the operational separation of Telstra into a wholesale and retail division which threatens to be the legacy of the coalition’s compromise.

If it goes through as planned, separation will lock in the regressive forced access regulation. Telstra Wholesale will be no more than a province of the ACCC empire controlled not by consumer demand but by an ACCC managed cartel of parasitic competitors trying to suck concessions from the one provider of significant communications capital that the country has.

The timing of the US decision is fortuitous for the federal government and those who will draw up the new arrangements for the final sale of Telstra.

We can look to the US, and their momentous decision to end this regulatory arrangement, for ideas on how to progress.

Broadband Projects An Embarrassing, Expensive Failure

Perhaps John Howard is right – State Governments are stupid. When NSW Premier Morris Iemma announced its ambitious program to blanket Sydney with WiFi coverage, providing it for free to consumers, he explicitly referred to a San Franciscan project as one to emulate.

But it is becoming increasingly apparent that the Californian project is imploding. US internet provider EarthLink may pull out of San Francisco’s municipal WiFi project. Australian governments should take note – local politicians are not always the best investors in communications technology.

After the ACCC had torpedoed Telstra’s proposal to build a Fibre-to-the-node network late last year — but before the major federal parties had announced their intentions to simply pay for the high-speed networks themselves — State governments one by one proposed their own solutions to the broadband controversy.

Leading the charge, Peter Beattie proposed that a private firm finance, build and operate a fibre-to-the-home network in Brisbane, but this was little more than a wishful press release.

Other states drew on overseas broadband proposals. Western Australia’s $1 billion fibre proposal was modelled on Alberta’s SuperNet. By all accounts, the Canadian network has been a relative success, but both SuperNet and the WA plan focus on building network backbone to essential services rather than piping internet direct to consumers.

Certainly, there are a wide range of international comparisons to call upon. Particularly in the United States, local governments are taking it upon themselves to get into the broadband business, with or without private support. But the experience has been rocky.

Local WiFi projects are often underutilised, underperforming, and expensive. Local councils may assume that free broadband would be popular, but one citywide project in Orlando, Florida was shut down in 2005 when the city realised that only 27 people were using the service per day.

Uptake rates have been more positive in other cities, but are in the range of one to two percent of the population, comparing poorly with the forecasted demand of between 15 and 30 percent.

The most high-profile network – and one which Iemma praised when announcing the Sydney plan – has also been the biggest debacle. San Francisco’s joint venture with EarthLink and Google is no closer to deployment than when it was announced in 2005. Indeed, the project’s failure was abundantly clear at the time when the NSW government was examining it.

The Google-EarthLink plan has been derailed by political theatre and contractual disputes. And even if EarthLink doesn’t pull out, the network speeds offered will be a paltry 300kbps – a speed which has been widely derided in Australia as ‘fraudband’. Contrast this with the 60 mbps nationwide fibre-to-the-home network that Verizon is investing in at a cost of US$18 billion.

It is tempting for politicians to offer things to their constituents for free, especially something as popular as broadband. But local government broadband projects are proving to be an embarrassing, expensive failure.

Hands Off Software, Samuel

Nothing gets you more attention than picking on the cool kid at school.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is arguing that Google is responsible for the content of the advertisements that accompany its search results, and that it is not sufficiently obvious that they are ads.

The ACCC alleges that ads that appear to link to one firm, but in fact link to another firm, are in violation of trade practices law.

But Google already has its own dispute resolution process that adequately resolves these problems. This machinery is not there because it wants to satisfy regulatory authorities; it’s there because it is part of the search engine’s commercial attraction to ensure its links and advertisements are credible and not likely to mislead searchers.

Google’s reputation rides on the integrity of its search results. The company may seem like it owns the internet, but the history of software and computing shows us that such domination is easy to lose. Users will migrate if they stop trusting Google.

The ACCC’s second contention has more important implications. The regulator argues that Google’s ads are inadequately distinguishable from its search results.Again, this argument is easily dispensed with. Not only does Google highlight and separate ads from search results, it also clearly labels them as sponsored links.
Furthermore, it is easy to tell where links are directed – Google publishes the full address to help its users navigate their searches.
This is in addition to the status bar visible at bottom of modern web browsers, which also indicates the destination of any given link.

Internet users are fairly sophisticated at determining the validity of individual sites. They have to be – the deluge of email spam has made computer literacy a requirement.

Even so, if a search engine wanted to pepper its results with ads, it should not be against the law to do so. Publications mix paid advertisements and editorial content shamelessly, but do not find themselves the target of high-profile ACCC lawsuits and media releases.

The biggest challenge modern software companies have is developing business models that can actually turn a profit. Reckless regulatory intervention will limit the ability for firms to experiment with ad-based revenue models.

The action against Google is a symptom of a deeper struggle that government and regulators are having with the implications of digital technology and the internet. Rather than seeing the paradigmshifting opportunities of online services, they are merely being seen as a further opportunity to expand the turf of the regulator.

ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel has repeatedly argued that online sporting content provided exclusively to Telstra BigPond subscribers could constitute a monopolistic bottleneck to competition. Never mind that this is a whole new service developed entrepreneurially by Telstra, and the rights to provide this content to subscribers had been ascertained by fair competition on the open market. Nor that Optus and other service providers are also seeking to provide unique content of their own.

The regulator has announced that this is the first action of its type internationally. But this is not entirely the case. By arguing that Google is responsible for the content of its ads, the ACCC joins individuals and firms who sue the search engine for merely linking to objectionable material.

Such activity is becoming common internationally – rather than suing the site or sponsor of the offending material, litigants target the much higher-profile Google. This ensures publicity and targets an entity that is wealthy enough to pay should the suit be successful.

There is a further worrying implication of this action. The software industry used to be clearly separate from the regulatory morass that rules other industries. The industry moves astonishingly fast, has no entry barriers and is characterised by the sort of innovation and entrepreneurial action that renders regulatory oversight redundant.

But in Europe and the United States, the potential expansion of regulation to online services has forced tech companies to set up lobbying divisions in Brussels and Washington staffed with lawyers and government relations specialists.

The last thing the industry needs is to compel software engineers to sit down with regulators before they can offer new services. To do so would be to invite the same regulatory stagnation that has enveloped telecommunications.

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.

Inventing Market Failure

Governments need problems. Without them, there would be nothing to solve. Australia’s broadband situation has presented governments across the country with ample opportunity to intervene. But is Australian broadband caught in a trap of underinvestment and market failure?

The importance of high-speed internet access to a nation’s economy is encouraging a great deal of policy experimentation around the world, and Australia’s state governments are enthusiastically embracing them. The Western Australian government pledged $1 billion to invest in a state-wide broadband network, modelled on a similar network in Alberta, Canada.

The New South Wales Government is tendering out a wireless broadband service, which is to echo the trend in the United States and Europe towards municipal WiFi. Municipal wireless networks tend to haemorrhage money, get bogged down in politics, and in the end deliver far less than they promise, so Sydney consumers should be glad that there are already a number of private wireless operators able to meet their demand.

There is perceived political benefit in attempting to deliver broadband to consumers. Queensland Premier Peter Beattie announced late last year a plan to pipe fibre directly into Brisbane homes, but private companies would have to pay for it, build it, and operate it. Beattie’s grand broadband initiative consisted of little more than a press release about how good a new network could be.

The federal government, having subsidised rural telecommunications since we first got a federal government, now feels compelled to update those subsidies to include broadband at increasing speeds.

If the prevailing political winds are to be trusted, it seems that governments have concluded that the marketplace cannot provide the level of telecommunications expected by consumers in the 21st century. But there is little good reason for their pessimism.

In the United States, Verizon is investing US$18 billion in fibre-optic cable straight to the home. It’s an enormously risky investment, and has its fair share of critics who note how uncertain the industry’s terrain will be when the rollout is completed in 2010. But nevertheless, Verizon has laid US$18 billion worth of chips on the table, to the benefit of US consumers.

An investment the size of Verizon’s would be almost impossible in Australia. Australia’s forced access policy would place any investment immediately into the hands of the ACCC, which would be likely to require it to give access to its competitors at a price of the regulator’s choosing. The disincentive to invest is obvious.

But the federal government has refused to reform the Trade Practices Act to encourage greater infrastructure investment. Instead, we are left with a set of telecommunications regulations which are designed to induce competition into a government-owned, 20th century telecommunications monolith, rather than regulations more suited for the 21st century consumer demand and technology.

The access provisions of the Trade Practices Act are far more draconian than in other jurisdictions. But entrepreneurial firms need to be given the freedom to invest on terms of their own choosing.

Some commentators have argued that the government should do that investment itself, but it would be better if the risk inherent in building a new network is borne by the companies that will profit from it, not Australian taxpayers. Would the government also commit to building every telecommunications network into the future? It is unlikely that a fibre optic network will be the last network Australian consumers demand.

Politicians are always eager to assert market failure – it gives them opportunities to gain publicity, deliver services which might translate into votes, and forge reputations for ‘getting things done’.

But Australian telecommunications is caught in a trap of poor public policy, not market failure. If the government wants to encourage investment, it should at least try to fix the problem.