Alfreido's Blog

The OPEL has been given the government ‘fling out the back door‘, finally. So instead of the Australian public throwing nearly $1 billion at a company which kicks our collective asses with high broadband prices, instead we are now dedicated to throwing $4.7 billion of our hard-earned cash to a national broadband solution that is still full of conjecture and political promises. It could be a public FTTN (fibre to the node) network that invites competition and low prices, or it could be a national smoke-signal network since Telstra won’t sell us back the network the government decided, in its infinite wisdom, to flog off.

Now I’m not backing up OPEL (the Optus-Elders consortium) on this, since they received an extra $940-something million dollars from ‘crazy lady’ ex-Minister Helen Coonan, only a couple of months before the Liberals got given the public ‘fuck off’ call, and have given hardly any evidence that they deserve it. One of the stipulations of the grant was that the Optus-Elders consortium provide 90% coverage to highly-unserviced areas (a la, everywhere located outside an Australian capital city) and our new Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy, has claimed that OPEL could only cough up around 78% coverage. I don’t know what school of business management the CEOs of those 2 companies went to, but shit, if someone threw nearly $1 billion of the taxpayers dosh at me and told me what needed to be done, I’d bloody well do it to the letter. Not for fear of what the government would do, but fear of what the public would do. To stuff up an endevour like this is like having a medicine ball thrown at your nuts. Your ego would be bruised forever.

So, our only alternative now is to wait and see what happens with the Labor Government’s $4.7 billion pledge to faster and more available broadband. Optus has a second chance, aligning with other Internet Service Providers like Internode and iiNet, arguably two very big players in the ISP community, but obviously, the main player hasn’t played ball with the rest of them, and that is Telstra. Saying ‘no’ to Optus for the first pledge is almost a tentative ‘yes’ to Telstra, but these next few months will be very interesting to say the least. If it’s Telstra selected, may God have mercy on us all.

Hot of the heels of an announcement by Microsoft and its intention to bid nearly $50 billion for internet dinosaur Yahoo, it got me thinking of the shape of the Internet if the deal were to take place (which, as I write this, will probably not go ahead, but Microsoft won’t give up so easily). In my slightly unprofessional view, I don’t think it will change the shape of the Internet at all.

It really hit home for me today on the way to work, whilst listening to an advertisement for a dentistry company, they quickly listed their contact details and they also told the listeners to ‘Google’ for their company name. It then dawned on me that, for me and nearly all of the Internet community, Googling’ has become the official Internet synonym for web-searching. I have also noticed that at my work, when most people go up to someone and ask to do a web search, they usually ask ‘Could you Google something for me?’. Improper asking skills aside, it just shows you how much influence Google has in modern culture. Google has way too much influence for the community for even a Microsoft/Yahoo joint company to put even a dent in Google’s reputation, its usage, and its profits. To compare the synonyms for the other two companies, when I think Microsoft, I think Windows and Office, and when I think of Yahoo, I think of fossil.

If this deal were to take place, what would Microsoft really have to gain for it? Yahoo’s search engine? Well, it would be an improvement over Microsoft’s one, but nowhere near Google. Mail? Google has GMail, which isn’t as popular as Microsoft’s Hotmail but is gaining momentum. Not to mention how closely entwined Google’s Mail service is to all its other services and how many more features Google Mail has over Hotmail. The only thing I can see Microsoft gaining in this deal is a photo-sharing social network, in Flickr. Flickr is currently owned by Yahoo, and is probably its only redeeming feature in my opinion, and it’s also the one thing Google hasn’t got inside its huge Fortress of Doom. But really, in the world of Facebook and photo sharing on there, would that even be a thing that Google worries about? With the money Google has, it could probably buy Facebook. That’d be the end of that chapter.

I think Microsoft is throwing a lot of money to a lost cause. I’m no business expert, but I can clearly see when someone is just simply throwing large briefcases of money out the window. Microsoft should stick to what it knows best: monopolizing the OS industry.

Something that has crept up on the Australian Internet community lately which is probably the most controversial thing that has happened in the history of Australia’s internet usage is the announcement by our new Labor Government and their intention to introduce a mandatory filter to every ISP currently operating in Australia. It’s sparked many disapproving thoughts throughout the Australian Internet community and I thought I would weigh in on the issue and give my opinion (even though I’m sure no more than 2 people really give a shit). I’m not going to launch into a whinge about how we are becoming alarmingly similar to China’s current state of Internet (ableit with less bandwidth available to us) where the government can instigate a ban on a website without the public being able to scrutinize the decision, but instead, I wish to analyze just how far this sort of mandatory blocking of questionable websites could go, and what it could do to Australian Internet.

For those not in the know, basically, the mandatory filter is going to be activated on every ISP on an opt-out basis (ie. you have to go out of your way and opt-out of the filter to be allowed to use your Internet fully again). It will then mean that every site you visit on the Internet will be checked against a blacklist of sites with questionable content (ie. pornography, violent content, messages to Allah/God/Santa) and if you have yet to opt-out, you will not receive the site, and will more than likely receive a message along the lines of “You dirty perv, the Australian government believes you should not be allowed to view this site, so ner-ner.” What possible explanation could be given to institute such a ridiculous system? Well, let’s queue Reverend Lovejoy’s wife for a second… “OH PLEEEASE, WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?”. Basically the new Labor Government (ie. Kevin Rudd and Senator Stephen Conroy) believe that something has to be done to protect the children from viewing inappropriate material whilst surfing the web, at the expense of everyone else’s viewing experience.

How is this going to inconvenience Australia? Well, let’s have a quick think:

• If the blacklist is quite big (which it will mostly be, considering the amount of filth on the Internet), every time you visit a website it will have to check against EVERY site on the blacklist before it will let you continue. This could slow down the Internet immensly. This would then directly contradict another promise delivered by the Labor Government, the promise of fast broadband widely accessible in Australia.
• The blacklist is rumored to have two levels, an R-rated level and an X-rated level. R-rated level, which is softcore porn, questionable but not offensive material, etc. will be viewable once you opt-out of the filtering. However, X-rated sites will continue to be blocked even after being opted-out, hence the Australian government is directly interfering in the content that you can view.
• With a population of around 20 million in Australia, it can be safe to assume that around 50% of Australia will want to opt-out of the filtering program. So that is going to be at least 10 million calls to customer service divisions all around Australia. We could easily see a massive increase in wait times for customer service, at least while that 10 million or so people get sorted out.

There’s are just some of the side effects of this filtering system, but what is even worse is how far this sort of system could go, if the Government was to avoid a backlash from the churchies or whingers who asked for this system in the first place (sorry, but I have to be blunt and take a leaf from Chopper Reid: “Harden the fuck up”).

Think a Big Brother scenario, where if you opt-out of the filtering, your actions on the Internet will be monitored. It’s already been hinted by the government, it may not be official policy yet but it’s definitely a possibility that it will be implemented. The government could implement ‘flagging’, where if you view any page which has the certain words (like say, ‘doggy-style’, ‘anal’ etc.) would be flagged and could be blacklisted very shortly. Sites like Youtube, Myspace, Facebook etc, they could easily be flagged and blacklisted as there is questionable material on there. Search engines like Google (which already automatically redirect to the Australian version of the site) could also be forced to have search results filtered, just like in China. The outcry which happened in China when this happened would happen all over again, and would undermine Google’s aim of being a search engine which delivers true search results. The search results would be only the ones that got through the filter.

This is a VERY slippery slope that the Government is taking, and I think it could destroy the crucial young vote that Labor relied on to actually get here in the first place, because I’m sure there’s a lot of teenagers who would be very disappointed that they can no longer bat off on a Friday night over those porn sites. It’s a major fuck-up in my opinion, and I really hope that the legislation is kicked out or the public outcry so large that the Government would be forced to back down, because once they implement it, it can only get worse, never better.

Let’s try out a hypothetical scenario for a second. You are part of the management staff for a very popular and well-respected Internet Service Provider (you can guess which one by looking at the title of this post :P), but a problem has arisen in the last few months. You see, there is a system in place called shaping which, when you go over your download limit, is activated and limits your speed to 64k for the remainder of the billing month. That’s all good. But then there is currently no limit to how much you can download AFTER you have been shaped. So a couple of nerds in front of their computer unable to remove themselves from the computer chair without using a blowtorch to separate the chair from their ass decided that they would download as much as they want after being shaped by setting up their torrents programs to just leech the crap out of everything they can get their hands on, 24/7. Suddenly, the ISP starts realising that they are absorbing the costs of way too much bandwidth and could potentially start losing money. So they need to fix this problem. Now let me ask you a question, you have 3 choices of fixes. What would you do?

1. Raise prices by up to $40 on some plans, to recuperate costs.

2. Invest in some P2P shaping software, to limit download speeds on torrent applications.

3. Fix up the broken implementation of ’shaping’ and have additional punishments for heavy over-users.

Most companies would only implement one of these fixes, preferably one of the bottom 2. Unfortunately, the customers with Internode have been stung by 2, possibly all, of those fixes. They raised prices, added additional punishments for heavy-users and, with the luck us Internode customers are having, will probably invest in P2P shaping.

I tell you what, it’s a real kick in the teeth for most people with Internode, especially me. Whilst I will admit that I download stuff from P2P all the time, I rarely ever go over my limit. In fact out of the 24 months I’ve been with Internode, I’m pretty sure I was shaped twice. But unfortunately, my plan went up $20, from $79.95 a month (affordable) to $99.95 a month (dream on). Because of some shit-head kids who wanted to download, say, 100 gigs of pr0n every night, everyone connected to Internode has to suffer.

I would say it’s a bit of a disaster for Internode, as Whirlpool has housed a lot of angry customers who are saying Internode have lost the plot. Now I am not going to leave Internode because their service is one of the best. But I’m seriously pissed that I have to drop back to a lower plan, and STILL pay the same bloody price I was paying before.

Damn leechers.