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random thought about the Google monopoly lawsuit

I was curious to hear what people think of the telecom breakup into chorus (and wasn't there a third party as well?) after all these years?

I was working there at the time, so some of the staff training was entertaining. I felt like they seemed to be on board with the general thrust of the changes, which I was a little surprised about (I expected a little more lip-service, I guess?)

Has it been a good change? I feel like the national fibre has been great but that's not actually related (but may have relied on the breakup as a precursor?)

6 comments

RegalPotoo

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One of the single greatest things that happened in my lifetime imo. Without the breakup we'd be in a similar situation as the US - crappy service, sky high prices, no incentive to invest in maintenance or upgrades

Dave

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From my understanding, the break up of telecom was a condition of the government giving Chorus billions of dollars to build the fiber network. They weren't going to hand one ISP a multi billion dollar network, it wouldn't have been a fair playing field.

I think the breakup of chorus has been great. Lines were open before if my memory serves me right, but it does feel like there is proper competition in the ISP market which was previously dominated by Spark and Vodafone.

Spark buying out all my favourite ISPs is a bit rough, but I definitely think things would be worse without it. You can get fast internet for $60-$70 a month, which is really quite cheap considering how critical internet is to everyday life.

AWOL_muppet

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Yes, unfortunately, it still feels like there's really only two telcos in the country - with various rebadged products (skinny, et al - I've list track of who's actually who).

Then again, our population density is probably off putting for any prospective telcos eyeing up the market!

Dave

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Specifically for broadband/fiber internet, we have heaps of ISPs. Lots of power companies selling internet as an add on, you can get it with your Sky subscription, and lots of little outfits you've never heard of. Spark owns half a dozen of the bigger ones, but there are plenty of others too.

This is a direct result of anyone being able to resell the internet provided by Chorus.

I'm not sure if this can be applied to Google in reality, but imagine if Google Search had to split from Google Search API and had to sell access to the search API at the same terms to anyone. You would get lots of little search engines that use Google Search API as a backend, and you would have no reason to use Google Search as the frontend because of the ads and tracking. They would retain a large market share (as Spark have), but would have to fight with others to have the best customer experience if they wanted people to keep using their search website.

deadbeef79000

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The Spark/Chorus breakup has been great.

Interestingly the changes internally is great too (I didn't work there but in a tangential business). When there is vertical integration like in old Telecom lots of good business opportunities are abandoned to preserve business activity in other areas.

With separation, that conflict of interest disappears.

E.g. telecom wouldn't roll out fibre to the home because it directly completes with their entrenched copper line retail business.

stellargmite

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Yes it was good with much improvement of services and competition since. My memory of the various issues may be blurry now but their was alot of unhappiness back then with Telecom. Corporations will always trend toward monopoly unless regulated against. The telco duopoly we had for some time after the networks taxpayers paid for in the first place was privatised, were barely in competition and they had a vested interest in keeping it that way of course. Unbundling the copper network took too long, and telecom had an interest in fibre rollout being slow early on. It was a painful time and eye opening when travelling to ‘developing’ nations in the mid 2000s to experience high speed virtually open access to ‘broadband’ as it was called when we were still begging for better than adsl (or was it still dial up?) to ‘surf the net’ as a chorus technician lazily called it after finally getting my service going once when I was trying to get a small software business communicating with overseas customers.

Was another entity Kordia? Or did that break from nzbc/tvnz/rnz ? I’ve lost track.

Gladly things are pretty good with speeds and access for what I need now. I have empathy for my friends in colleagues in Aus and some other ‘developed’ nations.

The google situation is massive and they need to be broken up, their mafia styled control of the ad auction and data harvesting industries needs to be cut down. They also have alot to answer for with how they've damaged our access to information which hopefully this will start to address. They’ve mutated the internet to fit their image in order to profit when the actual value of their product to their customers (advertisers) is highly questionable. Probably beyond the remit for this case , but a start. High hopes for the case, but stakes are huge for them and they're powerful.