Chris Barton: “..Joyce near high noon of communications portfolio..”
“..The time is rapidly approaching when we discover whether Steven Joyce has what it takes.
Whether he is a communications minister with mettle ..
.. or whether he travels the way of so many communication ministers before him - to the realm of the spineless jellyfish.
Maurice Williamson went there, championing the ideology of the light-handed regulator, but consigning the country to the slow lane of telecommunications for more than a decade in the process.
Paul Swain went there too. Faced with the big decision - whether to open monopoly services to competition - poor Paul didn’t have the bottle.
He’ll forever be known as the minister who the dropped the unbundling bundle.
He too set the country back another decade in the process.
Then came brave David Cunliffe, the minister who lived up to his name and slew the Goliath, Telecom.
It wasn’t a slingshot to the forehead.
Cunliffe used the twirling bolas of operational separation around the ankles to fell the giant and curb its rampant monopoly power.
Sadly, Cunliffe was weak on the mobile front - where duopoly rather than monopoly rips off consumers.
By machinations too tedious to mention, Vodafone conspired, with the help of Bill English, to force the minister, in 2007, to step aside from adjudicating in the arcane arena of mobile termination rates.
Basically, these are fictional fees mobile operators pay each other for calls terminating on one another’s network.
In truth they shouldn’t exist at all, but such is the power of telecommunications companies, they can make fiction reality and rort the hapless consumer.
Which is why New Zealand has one of the most expensive mobile services in the world..”
go to source/story>>Chris Barton: Joyce near high noon of communications portfolio - Opinion - NZ Herald News