No I don't blame them at all, but I would hate to let this stand in Australia, so let's hope this is indeed the first stage in a multi-stage rebuttal.
There is an Australian equivalent to the EFF, the EFA, but they are not the same organisation (and are not a party to the original court order). Unfortunately it can't fight a court battle on behalf of someone else just to get the precedent set (which is what needs to be done).
I realise that you guys don't have a high opinion of our laws around free speech, which I agree we deserve. For example we don't have a decent anti-SLAPP law (Gunns 20), along with all the crap around Janice Duffy & Milorad Trkulja and that due to a drafting error Google is liable for linking to pirated content. The current govt looked into fixing that last one, only to find the copyright maximalists lobbying that the rest of the world had got the laws wrong, not Australia.
However I find it disappointing that the EFF are tackling this in the USA and leaving us down here out to dry (with our crappy free speech laws). I think we need to start thinking as global citizens and tackling this bullshit wherever it occurs, not just insulating yourselves from it. Otherwise you may find that those "external" laws come back to bite you in the form of trade agreements. As we know trade agreements now seem to find the most corporate friendly laws of the participants and spread them across all of them.
Our politicians currently have a lot of interest in free speech and how it intersects with racial discrimination so it wouldn't be hard to bring the conversation around to other forms of free speech.
For the last few years we have had the government rolling out the NBN here. It doesn't provide dark fibre but more like a metro-ethernet - where each end-user gets four ethernet sockets and they can light those up by talking to a retail service provider, who then essentially rents the last-mile access on the NBN network. The NBN takes the connection (technically a vlan) to a local Point-of-Interconnect where the service provider picks it up.
It is not without it's problems, unfortunately it became a political football and after a change of government, the (almost) all fibre rollout has been scaled back to other technologies. The pricing structure is controversial to say the least.
The problem we have here in Australia is that there is still too little competition in the backhaul market, so data transmission is expensive (which arguably is the opposite problem from the US, which has too little last-mile competition). Then there is Telstra who refuse to peer with anyone...
Well I am guessing that someone has the money/will otherwise Google Fibre and any of the "municipal" broadband fibre wouldn't have been rolled out at all. I just see that this infrastructure competition leads to the other telco's feeling shut out and they start doing what they know best, which is to stop it rolling out in the first place.
I am wondering if a municipality says that they are rolling out the fibre and any of the other telcos are invited to buy the connections from them (they would only do wholesale). Has anyone tried this?
Could you guys clear something up for me. In the US is all telco competition at the infrastructure level. I.e. each ISP has to own their own infrastructure (fibre, DSL, wireless)?
So I'm guessing there is no last-mile wholesale market, where one mob installs some last mile infrastructure into a city (say fibre) and then rents space to whichever telco wants to use it and bill the clients. The telco's would have some handoff point when they pickup the traffic.
I just wonder if that wouldn't be the solution to all these woes - it's what the NBN does here (they only do last mile wholesale). That way the infrastructure isn't duplicated and telco's get to compete on price and service.
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Re: Re: We need to tackle this bullshit in Australia
No I don't blame them at all, but I would hate to let this stand in Australia, so let's hope this is indeed the first stage in a multi-stage rebuttal.
There is an Australian equivalent to the EFF, the EFA, but they are not the same organisation (and are not a party to the original court order). Unfortunately it can't fight a court battle on behalf of someone else just to get the precedent set (which is what needs to be done).
We need to tackle this bullshit in Australia
I realise that you guys don't have a high opinion of our laws around free speech, which I agree we deserve. For example we don't have a decent anti-SLAPP law (Gunns 20), along with all the crap around Janice Duffy & Milorad Trkulja and that due to a drafting error Google is liable for linking to pirated content. The current govt looked into fixing that last one, only to find the copyright maximalists lobbying that the rest of the world had got the laws wrong, not Australia.
However I find it disappointing that the EFF are tackling this in the USA and leaving us down here out to dry (with our crappy free speech laws). I think we need to start thinking as global citizens and tackling this bullshit wherever it occurs, not just insulating yourselves from it. Otherwise you may find that those "external" laws come back to bite you in the form of trade agreements. As we know trade agreements now seem to find the most corporate friendly laws of the participants and spread them across all of them.
Our politicians currently have a lot of interest in free speech and how it intersects with racial discrimination so it wouldn't be hard to bring the conversation around to other forms of free speech.
Eagles attacking drones
The proposed model is similar to the NBN in Australia
It is not without it's problems, unfortunately it became a political football and after a change of government, the (almost) all fibre rollout has been scaled back to other technologies. The pricing structure is controversial to say the least.
The problem we have here in Australia is that there is still too little competition in the backhaul market, so data transmission is expensive (which arguably is the opposite problem from the US, which has too little last-mile competition). Then there is Telstra who refuse to peer with anyone...
Re: Re: Confused from Australia
I am wondering if a municipality says that they are rolling out the fibre and any of the other telcos are invited to buy the connections from them (they would only do wholesale). Has anyone tried this?
Confused from Australia
So I'm guessing there is no last-mile wholesale market, where one mob installs some last mile infrastructure into a city (say fibre) and then rents space to whichever telco wants to use it and bill the clients. The telco's would have some handoff point when they pickup the traffic.
I just wonder if that wouldn't be the solution to all these woes - it's what the NBN does here (they only do last mile wholesale). That way the infrastructure isn't duplicated and telco's get to compete on price and service.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by Damian Ivereigh.
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