Businesses were hit hard during the Optus outage, with EFTPOS machines left out of action. As Australia moves further towards being completely cashless, experts say the outage isn't enough to see cash return as king.
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.
Not necessarily. The passport office is publicly owned and we pay some of the highest fees for passports.
The nbn is publicly owned but seeks to make a profit.
Anything that is government owned is paid for by us all anyway, through taxes. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But, when things are more expensive to use, but not used by all, it’s fairer. However for essential service, spreading the cost by how much people can afford is also good.
It’s not a case of public good, private badz but there is nuance and pros and cons.
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.
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Not necessarily. The passport office is publicly owned and we pay some of the highest fees for passports.
The nbn is publicly owned but seeks to make a profit.
Anything that is government owned is paid for by us all anyway, through taxes. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But, when things are more expensive to use, but not used by all, it’s fairer. However for essential service, spreading the cost by how much people can afford is also good.
It’s not a case of public good, private badz but there is nuance and pros and cons.