We don’t need to try and hang on to cash. We need redundancy. Whether that is by design with legislation, or making communications providers liable for losses for outage is the question. Obviously they will pass on any costs so the question is also which will be better for society and which will cost the least.
Privatizing infrastructure is not necessarily a bad thing. Competition in telecoms is a net benefit to society. However, there needs to be minimum service standards.
For instance, with telephones, there was redundancy for electric failure. However with nbn there isn’t. It’s especially a problem where you have outages like Optus where someone might rely on them for phone, internet and mobile service, in face being incentivised to do so. At least with mobile, there is redundancy of 000 calls through any network. We should look at how we can do similar. For instance, in the event of an Internet outage, a code could be entered into eftpos terminals to accept offline payments for 24 hours or similar. Sure, there is a higher risk of fraud for this period, but that’s better than no commerce.
If the infrastructure is publicly owned it won’t be seeking a profit or to please shareholders, only the Australian people, so prices will be lkw anyway. The it also has the possibility to be covered entirely by taxes (at least for some base level plan) since its now an essential service to the economy
