And that's not even covering the reason why the NBN was necessary in the first place. Howard's/Costello's (former Liberal PM and treasurer) privatisation of the

And that's not even covering the reason why the NBN was necessary in the first place. Howard's/Costello's (former Liberal PM and treasurer) privatisation of the essentially monopoly government-run communications provider without any separation of retail from wholesale or HFC network from telephony network. It was the equivalent of pre-breakup AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cox (and the only competition was Optus, probably equivalent in market share then to Charter now) all in one go without breaking up anything. Oh, and guess what, they're also in a 50%-50% joint venture with the only major Pay TV provider left, FOXTEL (so that's the equivalent of Dish and DirectTV on top of the above). And their partner in FOXTEL is Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp which also happens to own 70%, yes, 70% of daily newspaper circulation in the country. But in the light of that of course, the government has finally come to its senses and done something about media ownership regulations. ... And they actually did, but what they did was just overturning the rules to allow Newscorp to also buy more radio or FTA TV assets. Which included a recently bankrupt FTA TV network run in and owned in substantial part (essentially as much as legally allowed by regulation at the time) by a certain James Murdoch. How did it go bankrupt? Credit withheld, guess by who. Well, not entirely, it was him and a guy who also owns a affiliated regional FTA network who wanted to take over the lot. But in the only bit of actual hilarity in this whole thing, CBS bought that FTA TV network in bankruptcy. Outbidding Newscorp. So at least things are on the up and up. They may still have a complete and total stranglehold and perverted national infrastructure in collusion with a political party they're so strongly biassed towards. But at least an eternally bankrupt (they went bankrupt in the late 80s too) TV network at a time when TV is headed for terminal decline has escaped the grasp. Yay us :|