[AusNOG] NBN must avoid becoming 'failed state'

[Mark Newton]

On 20/09/2010, at 6:09 PM, Dobbins, Roland wrote:

> 
> On Sep 20, 2010, at 3:17 PM, Paul Brooks wrote:
> 
>> This headline is perfectly appropriate - the NBN cannot be for stupidity of the end-users or their service providers!
> 
> 
> Government neither manufacture private automobiles nor drive them for the populace at large (public buses excepted), yet they impose safety standards on said vehicles, compose traffic regulations, and check for compliance with same, 
> withdraw manufacturing/operating permits for compliance failures - how's this any different?

I'll capitalize the important bits to make sure they're noticed:

Because vehicles that don't meet those safety standards CAN AND WILL
KILL PEOPLE.  We know that TO A VERY HIGH DEGREE OF CERTAINTY.  Through
LONG AND BITTER EXPERIENCE, where every road safety rule that we've
implemented HAS BEEN WRITTEN INTO THE STATUTE BOOKS IN BLOOD.

It seems to me that you're drawing some kind of equivalency here between
violent bloody death and SYN floods.

It ain't happening.

If it is happening -- if your hyperbole about death-by-DDoS is true --
then I'll be asking serious questions about the medical operators who
were foolish and unethical enough to entrust life-critical functions
to a third-party network they can't control.

Give me another example ANYWHERE in the medical field where that happens.
Just one case where a doctor will entrust someone's life to something 
that s/he can't personally, obsessively, control.

An NBN may well revolutionize medicine, but it isn't going to turn 
medical practitioners into foolhardy idiots. 

> The ideas that a) government ought to be in the networking business, yet b) government ought not to set any security standards nor AUPs nor work to enforce same, seem to be mutually countervailing, do they not?

Why would their requirement to "set any security standards [or] AUPs" 
be any different to any other network operator?

NBNCo is, after all, supposed to be a private company.

(Right?  Or are we talking about a different NBN, one that isn't
reflected in current Government policy?)

> The primary difference being, of course, that it is a government-owned/-designed/-operated network,

You now owe NBNCo eleventy million dollars for new keyboards.

  - mark


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Mark Newton                               Email:  newton at internode.com.au (W)
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