this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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It's kind of terrifying to realise just how much power Optus and telcos in general hold. One single outage and the entire country grinds to a halt. If there was ever a situation where Optus' or Telstra's CEO wanted to kill everything, that really could. Telstra especially could fuck everyone over, since they operate the 000 switchboardy thingo too. It'd be massively illegal, and they'd get sued into the shitter, but why does a private entity hold this much power?
I guess there's an argument to be made that a problem like this could happen even if private telcos didn't exist, but it still seems ridiculous that something this essential to how society works isn't owned and operated by the government...
Absolutely agree. Somewhere along the line large portions of our society got conned into believing that government was a powerful entity which they should fear, and in the name of freedom and personal rights they enthusiastically endoresed selling off as many government assets as possible, and handing all that power away from democratically elected governments to big businesses. And all that money that was received from selling assets has been passed on to individuals as lower taxes, which then got gobbled up by the companies providing the services our taxes used to pay for.
Now we are in a situation where government does not really have the power to do most of what it should be doing and the businesses that are doing essential work are using their power for personal gain. And yet we still focus on trying to cut government down - as a society we hate the idea of government employees getting decent wages and benefits, so all the best employees go to work for private businesses, who we then have to pay a fortune to as "consultants".
I'm going to push back a little. Something being government owned, in of itself does not mean it will be run better. Sometimes it's operated even more poorly.
What is prudent is appropriate incentives and penalties for how something is managed regardless of who runs it.
I agree with this. Being run by a democratically elected government (and the threat of losing votes that follows) is not a sufficient mechanism for ensuring quality operation and service.
A lack of profit incentive is a plus regardless though, IMO. Sadly the motive of the profit driven private services and their consequent lobbying seems to be diametrically opposed to the competent running of a public service
Profit incentive is dampened when there is sufficient competition and mobility in moving between service providers. Ergo the urge to drive up profits is tempered by the possibility of lost customers.
Unfortunately this is Australia so... oligopolies rule us.