Posts by Hamish.MacEwan
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I've used the example of rail tracks and rail services separation extensively to support structural separation of telecommunications generally and Telecom specifically, thus I have a personal investment in thinking the structural reunion of rail, even under the control of the Government is no great thing.
Structural separation of rail has a chequered history, in the UK it was a disaster when both layers were private and seems to have come right with the non-profit collective model on the bottom and competition on the top.
The flaw, as I see it, in the NZ implementation was the State took over the rails and then inflicted a monopsony on itself by granting exclusive service rights to Toll. Always a dangerous move. Solid Energy I imagine is one customer who would love to have paid OnTrack and run their own trains. Those on the East Coast might have found a way to fund services without having to meet Toll's ROI.
As you note,
We can hardly pretend that the railways and ferries were doing well before the National government sold TranzRail
and we have no guarantee, but certainly a well founded suspicion that once rail is vertically integrated again, it will behave like most, nay all, vertically integrated transport network operators. At least we know we're going to be subsidising rail.
Odd isn't it, just when we cleave Telecom into three, we cleave Rail back into one.
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I'm just not sure I need to sign up to a highly procedural "code of conduct" to assert that right.
My feeling about this latest code is about informing participants than justifying assertions by operators, ie there is no need at all, but if you do, you are then bound to implement the procedure.
And one thing that critics and praisers of Tim & Jim's announcement alike miss is that they also offer
an "anything goes" badge for sites that want to warn possible commenters that they are entering a free-for-all zone.
The problem seems to be the interpretation of a Code of Conduct as an imposition, rather than merely an optional piece of consumer information.
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Its a sad fact of identity politics, particularly the victimocratic strain, that things can never get better despite the oft expressed demand for same.
Whether unions, feminism or ethnicity, improvement spells the end of the significance of the leader. Where would the Destiny church be if "morality" improved, out of work.
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Three major points:
1. Production and Transmission need to be structurally separated and certainly can be with the developments that YouTube and StreamingNet taking care of the distribution. I suspect the output of Maori TV would be far more widely viewed if it weren't tied to the legacy broadcast transmission model. Consequently FreeView is a perpetuation of the limited channel, industry serving model rather than opening up the channels to a wider range of suppliers and is a waste of money and spectrum.
2. If the content we pay to have produced were completely free of encumbrance, and why not, all methods of distribution would be available and used, leading to a far greater return. And if we could avoid the BBC's parochial model by not paying for the distribution, all the better.
3. Has anyone re-examined the nature of "public" broadcasting since the scarcity of channels and cost of production plummeted? I think now we could consider broadcasting the public (with some distributed approval model) rather than broadcasting to the public that which a small segment decides we want to see based on pseudo-commercial incentives (AKA viewers or listeners).