[AusNOG] Metadata defined in the bill

[Mark Newton]

On 26 Mar 2015, at 11:22 pm, Siraj 'Sid' Rakhada <virtualsid at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I really don't think even the industry banding together with a clear point would've made a difference, considering how the law passed into being.

An active industry which advocated and lobbied for good policy, and made bad policy politically painful, would head off this kind of rubbish before it even started.

Nobody around here got energised about it until draft legislation was produced, which is way, way too late. 

Same thing is happening with copyright: A bill was introduced to Parliament today, so the war has been lost. We can stop talking about whether you're going to be screwed, because the only argument left concerns the question, "How deeply?"

An active industry taking control of its own regulatory framework would have been out there for the last five years building on the success of the iiNet trial: Bashing political heads, in the media painting AFACT/ASA as toxic parasites expatriating Australian profits offshore, all to ensure that everyone in Canberra knew that they'd suffer dearly if they prostituted themselves to Hollywood, and everyone in Australia was primed and ready to cause the suffering to happen if they stepped out of line.

But no, none of that has happened. As I pointed out last week, the Onion Growers Association has a Canberra lobbyist advocating for the interests of their tiny, tiny, insignificant little industry, while the ISP industry is completely MIA. So the politicians and bureaucrats are in charge of you, rather than the other way around.

> I'm not sure where the energy against this new law is spent. I do think it's not best spent at service providers. They really didn't create this situation.

They contributed to it by not spending energy and money on it in 2007 when data retention first came up.

The bill that passed into law today ought to have been impossible. The failure was in allowing the Government to believe that it could get away with introducing it without paying a price.

Recall that a bunch of us fought off Conroy's efforts to modify the Broadcasting Services Act to force you people to censor the net. Do you think we waited until a bill was introduced to Parliament? No, we started fighting against it when Beazeley was still opposition leader, and made Conroy experience pain and humiliation every single time he opened his mouth about it. We didn't fight a defensive rearguard action at the last minute, we spent six years rallying communities, building coalitions, testing and refining our arguments, and getting our message out. It was exhausting, but it made the ALP drop their policy.

You guys are in a regulated industry. That's how you have to do it. Or you'll get walked over every single time.

(Oh, by the way: You're being walked over every single time.)

Take a lesson from the AMA: Doctors represent a large collection of tiny businesses, with enough lobbying clout to make the Government undertake backdowns that are so embarrassing that they bring the Prime Minister's job under threat. There is no conceivable way that the Health Minister controls the GP industry; the industry controls the Health Minister.

Why aren't you guys like that?

   - mark


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