Privatisation or government ownership - what's best for the people?

It refers to 4G as “experimental” (my smartphone says otherwise) and completely ignores 5G. That is why I am saying that the actual numbers have changed.

Generally, yes.

So are we in agreement that the numbers have changed?

The relativities between the hard theoretical limits should remain. (This is the actual figure of 20000x being quoted.)

The relativities between the best available actually built equipment may change.

The relativities between what is available using commercially viable equipment for the household may change.

The relativities between what is actually available to the household in Australia may change. (This might be most interesting to an actual internet user in Australia.) Sadly, in Australia, I don’t think there’s a lot of difference.

There’s a funny comment in response to the article you linked to although I can’t vouch for its accuracy:

You don’t mention that the experiments quoted require hundreds of lasers or expensive ($50k) water cooled research lasers to achieve these speeds. Let alone that the technology to modulate these setups requires a full 2m cabinet of electronics. You will NEVER see these speeds at home.

Taking the essence out of that … it makes sense to use this kind of high-end fibre technology to haul multiplexed data for a mass of users around big cities, noone would use RF for that, but at the edge of the network it is not as simple.

I think this is the only certain way.

My point is … whether government owned / controlled or privately owned / controlled … we need to think carefully about what trust, powers, etc. we invest in it. Some of the considerations might be there in either scenario, some might be unique to one scenario or the other. In some respects the current situation is the worst of both worlds (currently government but might be privatised at some point in the future) because we are forced to consider and plan for both scenarios.

It is difficult to forecast the future, either its needs or what will be available. At one point the world market for computers was going to be 5. :slight_smile:

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Did he say theoretical? As I said.

No. I went to the next link that contains close to exactly the same quote - but does make it clear that it is a theoretical claim.

Your link simply contains an unsupported, unsubstantiated claim - so it could be anything.

Your link: A single strand of fibre-optic cable can carry 20,000 times more data than the entire radio frequency spectrum combined.

The next link: This means that the information-carrying capacity of an optical fibre is about 20,000 times larger than the information-carrying capacity of the entire radio frequency spectrum. (and it does elaborate somewhat on what numbers and assumptions were used in order to make that claim)

How do we stop any privatisation? How do we reverse privatisations that have already happened?

As has been mentioned elsewhere, services delivered by public sector commission tend to go to pot when the provider is restructured into a corporation. Why that may be, I have no idea, but it does suggest that some services should avoid anything remotely connected with the private sector.

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Closer to home, the current performance of:
the NBN in all it’s forms,
the numerous mobile data services,
my aging ADSL2 which is still 18 months or more from having a replacement service from the NBN.

These are all real, no theory needed to compare which is better or who has access to which options, or whether we have an equitable outcome.

Consider also Public and Privatised health services?
Consider also the break up and part privatisation of electricity supply?
Consider also the original privatisation of Telecom Australia to create Telstra?
Even rail transport mostly bulk freight services now operate in a mixed state owned private enterprise environment?
There are also privately operated airports, toll roads and tunnels?
And as one of the community pointed out a significant degree of privatisation of aged care in the community?

Communications and data services are just another in a long line of changes.

Is there a common thread to how and why all these assets, once the almost exclusive domain of public ownership, have been privatised?

Where is the evidence of any benefits to the consumer from these examples of privatisation?

Why are some assets made available to the general public through share market listings, and others sold exclusively to private investment?

The most challenging common issue personally is one of equal access and equity. That’s said having lived, owned property and worked in two of our biggest cities through to small communities. It’s sobering being hours from any hospital, let alone one that only does procedures other than basic emergency and routine deliveries.

Our elected governments have been choosing the form of enterprise, public or privately owned entrusted to bring us essential services? The same governments directly for public and indirectly for private determine the level of service and cost to the consumer.

Which ever ownership option, the level of service to be delivered, and acceptable cost to the community (government funds) vs individual cost, appear as common issues in all the listed service areas?

P.S.
It is revealing to see for the NBN the more precise points comparing the relative merits of different technologies and their potential to provide competition or influence change.

It may be worth noting that there are other significant community topics devoted to such discussion. These topics being complex and finely focused as deserved.
Eg

And

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A common thread for some of them is vertical fiscal imbalance i.e. state governments have too little money for their responsibilities, and a limited revenue base.

For many services it is all about the money, rather than any attempt to benefit the consumer.

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Such is life (sadly).

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Which probably explains why privatisation rarely, if ever, benefits the people.

Is there a single privatisation that has unarguably benefited the people, more than the government of the day (and their mates, to whom the government sold the peoples’ assets)?

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We can be confident that there will be argument.

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An example of the latter would be the lease by the NSW government of 50.4% of a certain subset of the poles and wires for a period of 99 years. Perhaps that kind of deal wouldn’t suit retail investors.

More generally, if an investment is only permitted by law to “sophisticated investors” it may be more convenient for the seller to go with the latter rather than jump through the hoops to avoid that restriction.

There are probably lower cost overheads and less time and effort involved in going with the latter.

Privatisation in some form or another has been occurring for over a century, and will continue to occur. I suggest that question should be “what can sensibly be privatised, and what provides a social good that needs to be controlled by government?”.

As examples of the former, see space travel, the semiconductor, cryptographic techniques (which were classified as weapons by the US until the early 1990s, meaning they couldn’t be exported).

Examples of public services include telecommunications for all, as well as obvious monopolies such as airports and electricity provision. (You might also throw cable TV networks into the obvious monopolies category, seeing as a few suburbs of large cities got two lines of cable while most of Australia missed out entirely.)

Governments since the 1980s have been selling off the furniture to balance the books in the short term while leaving no assets to benefit future Australians. We have become a country of renters and owners in the worst sense, where not just homes but the entire infrastructure is owned by a few and rented to the many. This is not just short-sighted, but should be considered criminally negligent.

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How that is determined might also depend on whether as an individual you are a cashed up investor or struggling to pay the bills month to month?

Is there anything left to sell that is not there for social good, or critically and sensibly needs to remain under government control?

Given what has been sold off recently, including the titles registries in several states, it suggests everything is for sale. It is only a matter of time.

It’s unlikely to go to the ultimate end point. It might be government/s cease to own any services. In that instance is there any need for taxes as everything will be user pays? Zero taxes, zero funds to pay for the Parliament. An ex employer once told the staff it should be our goal to do such a great job improving how the business ran we would have done ourselves out of the job! I doubt that is a shared goal of those in control?

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I’m looking forward to the time when we need to reverse failed privatisations. Cheap, it won’t be.

Brew your own defence forces. Roll your own police. That’ll work well.

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Counterpoint: There is precedent in history although not on the precise level of the nation state. When militaries are the province of volunteers some see little difference in privatisation versus the status quo. Mercenaries are usually better paid than ‘volunteer’ militaries so there could be reasonable argument it improves their lot. Are mercenaries more or less reliable? One can only look to the past for guidance, and consider some of the more extreme voices in international affairs might be moderated when their own skin was in the front lines or they were exposed as cowards as the cases might be.

Are mercenaries (defence or police) less accountable? It depends on the country. Increasingly government absolve their defence and police to the maximum possible, and sometimes put innocents through years of antagonistic litigation for redress that may never come. A paid ‘department’ could sack a bad member, unlike the difficulty in them doing it now under the auspices of politicians as well as public opinion.

While not something I promote, neither do I summarily discount it when considered against the evidence at hand.

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Based on whats happened to bus services in this area… definitely prefer government owned. The privarte company couldn’t organise a p**-up in a brewery. Buses dont arrive on time (and in some cases just dont come at all). the “new and improved” timetables have made that situation worse, with kids waiting for buses to take them to school which dont come, people waiting to get to doctors appointments and having to get taxis or Ubers, its insane. The government run service was just never this bad. I was planning on selling my car and switching to buses, but the service is just so unreliable, I cant do it.

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No, it depends upon who is paying the bills. Certainly fire ‘insurance’ is a case in point, where one house could be left to burn to the ground while the insured house next door is saved. Of course, there have been other models of ‘insurance’ that are even less benign - the “this business sure looks like a firetrap” model of extortion.

In the ancient Roman empire, the army often shifted loyalties based upon promises from would-be emperors. If the emperor failed to pay, they tended to live rather short lives.

The trouble with ‘outsourcing’ is that you can very easily lose control. Of course, this is the point in many cases - governments are happy to take plaudits but don’t like the blame and so outsourcing is seen as an option for keeping things at arm’s length. Unfortunately for said politicians, most voters don’t care about the ‘model’ of service delivery - it’s the government’s fault if something breaks.

The dream of libertarians is that there should be no government and we should all fend for ourselves. That’s fantastic, until you realise that it sentences a large proportion of the population to a miserable and terrified existence. Need the police? Did you pay that bill for the annual subscription?

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The absurdity of this, that so many cannot see, is that weakening government does not put the power in the hands of the people but gives it to business that would then carry on unfettered. Putting big business in charge would give them less personal freedom than elected governments. Sure they would nominally pay less tax but, especially for the lower paid, that would be overtaken by ‘user pays’ on essential items. Think of the US health system pre-Obama, now triple it and extend that principle into other parts of life.

Libertarianism is the wet dream of those with large discretionary income who feel victimised by a progressive tax system and haven’t found the right tax accountant yet.

Elected government is far from perfect but it is to some degree accountable to people, business is only accountable to profit. For all its weaknesses democracy has the advantage that you can remove bad government without violence; that is not so of plutocracy.

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The 1975 sci-fi movie Rollerball protrayed a world without any governments, and it was run by 8 mega-corporations.

It did not portray a very happy planet.

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Rollerball is more action packed and less politics. Pohl and Kornbluth did the corporate dystopia in 1953 “The Space Merchants”. A good read and quite prophetic.

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