I’ll be on radio Triple J’s current affairs program Hack this evening. They’re covering the National Broadband Network announcement from 5.30pm AEST. I believe I’ll be live in the studio after they’ve done all the set-piece interviews up front. You can access a live stream from the Triple J website.
WTF? National Broadband Network as FTTP!
Yes, the story of the day is the astounding news that Australia’s new National Broadband Network will be 100Mbit/second Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) — and government-owned!
I’m part of Crikey‘s massive coverage, which kicks off with an editorial, Bernard Keane’s Huge, historic and nationalised: broadband goes ballistic and Fibre To The Node becomes Fibre To The Nerd.
My contributions are A massive and much-needed catch-up and Crikey Clarifier: National Broadband Network.
My friend and colleague Mark Pesce also has 100 million bits per second: you call that fast? And there’s plenty more — some of which is behind the paywall.
As Bernard Keane says, “It will take days — perhaps weeks or months — to work through all the possibilities of this, technically, commercially and politically.”
It’s also a massive face-saver for the minister, Senator Stephen Conroy. Instead of being sacked for screwing up the original tendering process, he’s being given command of the biggest infrastructure project in Australia’s history. Just why does he get this lifeline, I wonder?
This is a massive shift in Australia’s communications policy. Stay tuned.
Links for 05 April 2009 through 07 April 2009
Stilgherrian’s links for 05 April 2009 through 07 April 2009, divided into groups according to their ease of use:
- No Snooping – Design Issues: Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s notes on a discussion at the House of Lords by Baroness Miller on 11 February, looking at Deep Packet Inspection and the threats to privacy, democracy and growth of the Internet.
- Deep Packet Inspection | Office of the Privacy Commisioner: Canada’s Privacy Commissioner puts a collection of essays online. What has Australia’s equivalent done, I wonder?
- April Fool prank tanks Telstra stock | The Australian: A magazine publishes a hoax story about Telstra being split up, and the share price rises 5%, increasing the company’s market capitalisation by $1.9 billion. Temporarily.
- Thinking the Unthinkable Parable of the Future of News | Networked News: An essay that deserves a comfortably-paced read over a cup of tea.
The future of “quality” journalism
Amazing! A bunch of media people gathered at the ABC’s Sydney headquarters last week to discuss the future of journalism, and not one of them whinged about those awful bloggers. Hurrah! Unlike July 2008, when journos were still looking for someone to blame, the debate has finally moved on.
That’s how my piece for Crikey today begins. It’s an overview of the ABC forum I was at the other day.
Quotes from Crikey publisher Eric Beecher, Alan Kohler, News Limited’s Campbell Reid, UTS journalism lecturer Wendy Bacon and former leader of the Libery Party, John Hewson.
New Journalism: those who get it, those who don’t
Increasingly, I’m getting annoyed with otherwise-intelligent people who simply don’t “get” what is happening as our world becomes hyperconnected and rail against it. The man in the photo is Henry Porter. He doesn’t get it. But a pseudonymous commenter at The Poll Bludger this morning does. And he explains it better than I ever have.
Ah, the contrast!
In a piece for The Observer, Porter’s headline warns that Google is just an amoral menace. The ever-growing empire produces nothing but seems determined to control everything, we’re told.
Exactly 20 years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote the blueprint for the world wide web, the Internet has become the host to a small number of dangerous WWMs — worldwide monopolies that sweep all before them with exuberant contempt for people’s rights, their property and the past…
One of the chief casualties of the web revolution is the newspaper business, which now finds itself laden with debt (not Google’s fault) and having to give its content free to the search engine in order to survive. Newspapers can of course remove their content but then their own advertising revenues and profiles decline. In effect they are being held captive and tormented by their executioner, who has the gall to insist that the relationship is mutually beneficial. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google they would be almost certainly in breach of competition law.
It’s worth reading the full rant — because it completely misses the point: I only found Porter’s piece because Google had told me about it.
Google didn’t “steal” his content. It produced a new audience member. And that’s what all media outlets produce: an audience for their advertisers — or, in the case of the ABC and SBS, an audience sufficiently large to justify their existence.
Ever though I think this one piece by Porter is full of shit, I clicked through, read about him, and discovered much better pieces about his concerns for our declining civil liberties and how the decline of one-way TV sets the scene for increased public debate. Porter now has a new reader because of Google.
However that commenter over at The Poll Bludger, yes, he got it right…
Continue reading “New Journalism: those who get it, those who don’t”
A Series of Tubes episode 80
This week’s A Series of Tubes podcast is up and running. Richard Chirgwin talks with Colin Goodwin from Ericsson Australia about 500Mb/sec DSL, and with me about Senator Conroy’s comments on the iiNet lawsuit, ACMA’s research into social networks behaviour, and the Vodafone-Hutchison merger. A Series of Tubes is part of the IT Radio family of podcasts.