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Dear Ms. Worth: Re: Online Services Bill Thank you for taking the time to talk to me yesterday. Following your suggestion, I have included a few points below which I think deserve further investigation. I understand that this industry is important to you partly due to the fact that most of the South Australian Internet industry, consisting of several hundred jobs, is in your electorate, and I appreciate the attention you are giving to following it up. I understand that the Government isn't particularly interested in the civil liberties implications of the Online Services bill. Be that as it may, I feel that it is also ignoring a number of significant economic and operational arguments against it, which I will summarize below. I believe the Government is doing the industry a severe injustice by chanting the mantra of, "The fact that the problem is difficult does not mean we shouldn't make the attempt." Firstly, the Industry is already receiving reports of content providers going offshore and content providers which were previously considering Australia moving to more favorable environments instead. This is entirely understandable: Due to Telstra's charging policies we already have some of the world's most expensive telecommunications infrastructure, and our wholesale bandwidth charges are approximately twenty times higher than in the US, and our capacity to reach the rest of the world is ten times slower than Europe. It is difficult enough to attract overseas content to Australia given those circumstances; The threat of censorship by a Government which has repeatedly shown that it doesn't understand anything whatsoever about the Internet is, for many online businesses, the last straw. I attended an Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce (SA) Inc. business lunch in Adelaide last month, during which Mr. Bob Mansfield spoke of the importance of Australia seeing overseas businesses as customers, and offering them a better deal than other countries in the Asia-Pacific region who are trying to attract their business. Mr. Mansfield provided several examples of Government and Industry cooperation seducing significant amounts of overseas investment. In an environment colored by the heavy-handed regulations the Government has drafted for the Internet in Australia, it will no longer be possible to enter into those sorts of cooperative arrangements to bring overseas dollars into the country. Mr. Howard often speaks of market deregulation in the context of the world economy, and is a proponent of eliminating regulatory obstacles which do not mirror approaches faced by businesses in the rest of the world (e.g.: subsidization for the motor industry). Censoring the Internet is directly at odds with that philosophy: no other country anywhere in the world which is serious about the Internet censors it. We will be unique as a first-world country with Internet-specific content regulations. I would encourage you to think about the effect that will have on an overseas business wishing to set up an Asia-Pacific point of presence: They could come to Australia, and put up with expensive connectivity, slow access speeds, and Government interference in the ability of Australians to view the content they are selling to the world, or they can go to any other country in the world except China, Burma and Iran and not have any of those problems. I am also not entirely sure that the Prime Minister understands that the filtering software that Mr. Alston is recommending fundamentally does not and can not work; if Australian ISPs are forced to use it, Australians will not be able to view millions of perfectly innocent web sites, including the sites owned by foreign companies setting up shop within our shores. Given that undeniable fact, what possible reason could a foreign business have for locating their electronic business in Australia? Bandwidth pricing is another issue this legislation will harm: As the content we send to the rest of the world increases, Australia is moving into a position in which we can negotiate for settlement pricing on International Internet carriage services. Settlement pricing will reduce our bandwidth costs by up to 80%, but it is being rendered impossible by the significant devaluation of Australia as a place to host internationally-requested content caused by this legislation. While the rest of the world is installing 622 megabit per second OC12 fibre-optic links, we're still playing with abysmally congested 2 megabit per second links because they're all we can afford. The Online Services bill stands to make that competitive disadvantage a permanent feature of the Australian Internet landscape, something no other country in the region needs to worry about. Another issue which the Government seems to have neglected is the message this legislation is sending to the international Information Technology community: The sheer ignorance of the approach taken by Mr. Alston, and his defense of an approach which every coalition MP I have spoken to knows won't work, speaks volumes of the support (or lack thereof) the Australian Government provides to the Information Industry. The credibility of the support NOIE provides to the Australian Internet industry, and Mr. Alston's personal credibility on technical matters, are both at an all-time low. How can Mr. Alston credibly defend his legislation on the charge that it is technically impossible to implement when his grasp of the technology is so appallingly low that he doesn't even know what an Internet mailing list is? (Senate hansard, page 5164) Mr. Alston repeatedly claims that technical factors will be taken into account when judging whether it's reasonable for an ISP to fail to conform to an ABA take-down notice, but I feel quite confident in my claim that the Industry as a whole is emphatically not reassured by that claim, on the grounds that the Government has shown itself to be in no position to judge the technical merits of anything whatsoever to do with the Internet. The profound difficulty the Industry has in communicating these matters to Mr. Alston is only exacerbated by the appearance that he doesn't understand them; For that reason, and because he has consistently refused to listen to the Industry he is supposed to support while promoting regulation which will affect the Industry in the most fundamental of ways, my opinion is that he is singularly inappropriate to serve as Australia's Information Technology Minister. I strongly urge you to reconsider the Online Services Bill, and seek consultation from the Industry on how to improve it before it is passed: The Government's track record on this issue gives us little reason to hope that our concerns will be addressed responsibly by the Government once the bill has passed. On the other hand, the Industry's track record is one of consistent support and cooperation with the Government's aim to remove the true "nasties" of the net, as evidenced by the large number of prosecutions of child sex offenders under the Crimes Act attributed directly to evidence gathered by ISPs in cooperation with the nation's police forces. Sincerely, |