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The headline on news.com.au reads: “Foxtel is Telstra’s IP Choice.” I read, “Telstra has no intention of competing with Foxtel.” The article quotes BigPond chief Justine Milne:

The way I define IPTV will be pay TV delivered over IP (internet protocol) networks … We have already got a really fantastic pay-TV company in Foxtel.

My translation: “why on earth would we compete with something we own?”

And this is precisely why we destroyed competition by letting Telstra do what other telcos around the world dream of: holding the copper and cable networks. Jerry Hausman and I wrote the other week that this had harmed competition in telephony. Well, it is pretty clear that it will also harm future competition in television. Like we had a ton of that already!

This week’s Business Review Weekly contains a write-up of the iTunes Index familiar to readers of this blog (click here and here for the Aplia write-up); text over the fold. The BRW puts the exchange rates relative to the US dollar. One issue with that is that they all seem over-valued mainly due to the likely fact that Apple got its pricing wrong in the US (setting it too low relative to what it would have preferred to do in hindsight).

For this reason, I present the same table here but relative to the Australian dollar.

Read more

It has all been said before but eventually electronics will kill paper. Well, it looks like we are a step closer. Check out this post from Gizmodo and make sure you take a look at the video.

It is not a controversial thing to say that the UN may not get quite the respect it deserves as a World governmental authority. In particular, I would have thought the US government was largely indifferent as to UN decisions; particularly, on security. Well, it turns out that that is not the case. The US cares enough about the UN to throw money in the direction of Security Council members.

In a paper forthcoming in the Journal of Political Economy, Ilyana Kuziemko and Eric Werker, “find that when a country takes over one of the rotating seats on the UN Security Council, U.S. foreign aid jumps by almost 60%. When the country leaves the Security Council, the aid falls back to the old levels. The impact on aid is even larger when there are important international events (like invasions of Iraq) that put the Security Council in the spotlight.” (quote from Freakonomics) If the US didn’t care about the UN, they wouldn’t direct funds in this way.

Nature this week reports on research by my co-author, David Hsu (Wharton), and my new colleague, Kwanghui Lim (MBS). Here is an extract: Read more

The Age today (article over the fold) carries an obituary for Australia’s only professional obituarist, Philip Jones, who died last week. And you guessed it, he wrote his own obituary. Suffice it to say, it is far more personal and introspective than the average. It is also self-critical. I guess this is a task Jones wouldn’t trust to anyone else. Read more

Today’s Australian Financial Review carries an opinion piece by myself that outlines more completely my argument that the government’s current privatisation plans represent a half-way house under the cloud of the Future Fund. Actually, that Fund should be renamed the Fog Fund as it seems designed to hide away failed government policy. (Click here for the article).

When I was studying for my PhD, I watched every Star Trek episode. It was a distraction. Little did I know that it could have itself been considered study or research. Djoymi Baker has done just that. She has just obtained a PhD at the University of Melbourne watching all 700+ Star Trek episodes and making it into a thesis entitled Broadcast Space: TV Culture, Myth and Star Trek (click here if you don’t believe me). [And before you ask, no I wasn't on her committee but let's face it that probably would have been a good idea]. From the article, I am not quite sure what her research findings were except that she establishes key myths that have influenced society since.

The article doesn’t say where Dr Baker’s academic career is going from here, Doctor Who? Star Wars? or what she might be teaching. We will have to watch that with interest.

FYI, in this weekend’s post on Game Theorist, I engage in the fruitless exercise of benchmarking my children to Fields Medal winner, Terrance Tao.

Click here to see what the kids are in to these days and what they really talk about on myspace. [Thanks to Greg Mankiw for the tip]

PS. If that takes your fancy, I believe there is an Australian (or Pacific Rim) Edition of this book.

A year ago, MBS tried valiantly to hire Michael Schwarz; a teriffic game theorist who had a Stanford PhD and had held a position at Harvard. Instead, Michael took the unusual step of going to Yahoo! where he could pursue his research but in an environment stimulated by the real world. It seems to be going well as a story about his work appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Read more

[Movie Review] Thank you for Smoking is one of those movies where you go in asking yourself whether they can pull it off. The movie centres on a tobbaco lobbyist who is smart and is good at what he does. His goals are naked: to encourage people to smoke. He is intelligent enough to believe that smoking kills. And he is amoral enough to do his job well regardless. The movie makers do not intend for us to hate him and, indeed, hope that we will feel happy when he wins. And all the time, there is the background of the world today where they do not want to create a ‘pro-smoking’ movie. Read more

Let’s see: the Government has an on-going conflict in regulating Telstra because doing so properly harms Telstra’s profits which harms its short-term share value; something the Government doesn’t want to do because it wants to sell it off. But the Government does have a controlling interest in the company and so can, if it wants, control it. So to resolve the conflict, what does it do? Lose the controlling interest but keep enough of a financial one so that the on-going conflict remains. In the process, it loses its long-term ability to manage the structure of Telstra in a way that could compensate existing shareholders.

What goes out the door? We get none of the benefits of privatisation — ability to regulate without a conflict and the ability to change management without political interference — and all of the costs — assets sold at a low share value, a gaping hole for regional Australia and no opportunity for structural change to resolve the whole mess. Heavy sigh.

Nick Gruen describes his experiences in networking his house and extolls the virtues of WiFi. His main idea — which is something I have thought about too for some time — is that we are thinking about wireless networking the wrong way. Currently, it is seen as a security threat — the view of the veto holder in our household. One reason for it being seen that way is that it is; outsiders can surf on your bandwidth and can also potentially access your own data. The latter is a big problem (although it is likely to pervade wired as much as wireless networks) while the former is, as Gruen points out, the solution to other issues. Namely, households are not the relevant unit for purchasing broadband; neighbourhoods are. Saavy internet providers should be thinking about how to network neighbourhoods.

Of course, I am almost sure there are terms in network access agreements that surely prevent this. But if that is the case, then it is removing restrictions on legitimate sharing and neighbourhood investment that should be a priority for governments.

In today’s New Matilda, I update my earlier blog piece on network neutrality (click here for the article). As usual, if we have anything to worry about, it is Telstra.

On that score, the New Matilda website has a poll on what should be done with Telstra. 64% of voters appear to favour re-nationalising Telstra over any form of privatisation.

Newspaper reports today suggest that there will be some economic consequences from the dropping of Pluto from the list of planets:

With one vote, toys and models of the solar system became instantly obsolete, forcing teachers and publishers to scramble to update textbooks and lessons used in classrooms for decades.

Let’s think about it for two seconds before we get hysterical. First, there is still something named Pluto out there and it orbits the Sun so the toys and models are fine. Second, so science teachers have to do what we economics teachers do all the time; update lectures faster than textbooks. Welcome to the world of fluid facts. Finally, even if textbooks need to be updated, I think publishers will be overjoyed at killing the second hand market.

The interesting thing is how will be updated first: Britannica or Wikipedia? Well as of today, 25th August, Wikipedia had dropped Pluto and it looks like the same happened on Britannica.

From Hansard, 18th August, 2006:

Mr PRICE (2.36 pm)—My question is to the Treasurer and Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party. I refer the Treasurer to table 1B in the latest version of Australian Bureau of Statistics publication 7215, showing that the trend annual growth in chicken slaughter was: 1.4 million extra chickens every year under the Whitlam government; 2.8 million chickens under the Fraser government; 2.2 million chickens under the Hawke and Keating governments; and 2.6 million chickens every year under the Howard government, with 110 million chickens now dying every year. Will the Treasurer confirm that chicken deaths will always be higher under a Liberal government than under a Labor government?

I haven’t been able to find the answer but I presume it is ‘yes.’ [Thanks Louise Sylvan for the tip]

I have a short piece in Crikey today that is a lay version of my post last week on Telstra the access seeker. The text is over the fold: Read more

I don’t normally just point out blog posts without comments but for those interested in understanding just a little more about the power of Bayes Theorem take a look at Greg Mankiw’s post today predicting who might be the next US President. It is all based on prediction markets. Interestingly, I wonder if after the nominations are in the market will update in a Bayesian way?

Just as I had installed Microsoft Live Writer for blogging, comes Google’s answer: Writely. This one isn’t just for bloggers, it is a full blown Word Processor. Google have this for spreadsheets too . The only disadvantage for blogging is that it didn’t automatically take my settings and provide a preview that is the same as my blogging site. But one big advantage is that it requires no local software so that you can use it from any computer. This is just a microcosm of the battle between Microsoft and Google (click here for an interesting article on that issue).

Anyhow, if you are reading this, then posting worked.

[Update: actually, it posted without a header. I will have to work out how to fix that one].

FYI, a couple of new posts on Game Theorist this weekend including one on swimming lessons for children and a review of 49 Up.

A while ago two posts of mine on why don’t books have ads provoked a considerable reaction (you can click them here and here). My argument was there seemed nothing special about books as media and it would be virtually costless for publishers to try it. This was especially so where books sold in larger volumes and also didn’t really have to stand the test of time. Textbooks was something that I thought would at least fit that bill. Read more

In New Zealand, TelstraClear is the access seeker to the dominant firm, Telecom NZ’s, infrastructure. I don’t want to read too much into this (you know NZ is surely “COMPLETELY DIFFERENT” from Australia and all that) but it makes interesting reading. Here is the link to a key submission on PSTN access (May 2005) and over the fold an interesting extract: Read more

There is an excellent article in today’s New York Times by Austan Goolsbee (here is a link live at the time of writing this blog). He comments on attempts by Texas to build the next Silicon Valley in Texas around their universities. As he points out, the evidence is that this might build up Universities but there are no guarantees on flow-on effects to the surrounding cities or even the state. Read more

JonBenet Ramsey is the US’s Azaria Chamberlin (click here). Cue Meryl Streep Cate Blanchett. (Anyone know if she can do the appropriate American accent?)

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