News That's Fit To Punt - 28/Jan/2016

The Republic Debate Again

Back in the 90's I was a Republican. Not the American kind but the Australian kind that wanted a head of state who was Australian. I have to admit that the choice was based on a few factors. One, was the 1975 Dismissal, which left a very bitter legacy in our polity. Another, was the fact that the Queen - with all her trappings and achievements - seemed not just an anachronism but an out-and-out irrelevance. This led me to think the Republican cause in Australia was progressive. The last factor was how Paul Keating as Prime Minister argued the case for a Republic, which was very persuasive.

Of course we know how that ended. At the time, the debates came down to Tony Abbott on the side the monarchists, and Malcolm Turnbull on the side of the Republicans. It didn't matter that Tony Abbott was largely incoherent in his logic, and that Malcolm Turnbull was persuasive; John Howard had managed to split the Republican vote between those who wanted a direct election of a President and those who wanted minimal change in the structure of the government.

More importantly, we find that Turnbull is not so bullish on the moment today. That stands in stark contrast to the new Australian of the Year who wants to push the issue.

I think about that today and a number of striking things pop out. First, there is the obvious strangeness of seeing Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull continue to tussle in the public eye; this, despite being on the same party. Tony Abbott went on to do in Malcolm Turnbull as Opposition Leader back in 2010, and it took until late last year for Malcolm Turnbull to wrest back the leadership role with the Liberals. The rancour remains; Abbott will contest the seat of Warringah and will remain the thorn in Turnbull's side. Another words, the tussle between these two men is likely to continue a little bit longer.

The second, is the persistence of the idea that Australia should become a Republic, and that this symbolic change is somehow vital to our national identity. Thus, notwithstanding the loss, the Republicans aren't going to let it go. Naturally, the Monarchists won't either. But on a long enough time line, the Republicans may well get their way; and once they do, it's hard to conceive of a way back to a constitutional monarchy.

In the mean time, there's research to show that the younger generation are eminently okay with the Monarchy. Those who did not witness the Dismissal simply don't care. The people most wedded to the idea of the Republic are the people who came of age in the Whitlam era. That tells you something about the years since, and how they have slowly obscured the anger, obfuscated the problematic, and hung a veil over the ugliness that was palpable to those present in 1975. Maybe the Republic is not as inevitable as it seems.

Is The Property Bubble Finally Popping?

This is the question.
First off, Sydney house prices dropped 3.1% in the last quarter.

Rising mortgage rates, restrictions placed on investor lending, a surge of new apartments and a slowdown of Chinese buyers in the Sydney market were all behind the sluggish result, AMP Capital chief economist Shane Oliver said. 

“The December quarter was a bit unusual in that a lot of negative things came together in a perfect storm,” Dr Oliver said. 

But this fall “exaggerates the weakness in the market” as it has to be viewed in the context of the huge growth Sydney already experienced, he said. 

Over the past three years, Sydney house prices are up 52.6 per cent or $349,183, Domain data shows, with house prices up 14.8 per cent over 2015.

So there's that account. Of the factors cited, the most ominous might be the retreat of Chinese investors, as it signals some kind of link to the collapse in Chinese economic sentiment. Of course, the Chinese share market is known not to be connected to much, but all the same, nobody believes the official account that the Chinese economy is growing at a 7% clip.

Apart from which, the Chinese markets themselves have popped. Who is doing the lending now to enable Chinese investment in to Australian real estate? That being the case, you have to wonder if the drop in Chinese buyers was a little hesitant drop or a tap turning off.

The Pot Calls

Rupert Murdoch is a funny tweeter. Rupert seems to think Google needs to pay more tax. The problem with Rupert taking such a position is, that his own companies also need to pay more tax.

Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp paid no UK net tax at all between 1987 and 1999, attacked Google parent's tax deal with the UK. 

"Google et al broke no tax laws,'' Murdoch wrote on Twitter. "Now paying token amounts for p r purposes. Won't work. Need strong new laws to pay like the rest of us.''
He was referring to Alphabet's agreement to pay £130 million pounds in taxes dating back to 2005.

Murdoch's attitude to low tax rates in 2016 put contrasts with data on his company's behavior in the past.
A 1999 report by The Economist showed Murdoch's own company, News Corp, had paid a tax rate of 6 percent over the previous four years.

In the UK, it had paid no net tax at all on £1.4 billion of profits made since 1987.
Fairfax Media reported earlier this month that eight of the 10 media companies that paid no income tax in Australia are linked to the Murdoch family.

What can you say to that kind of brazen hypocrisy? It's sort of funny he thinks there's a tax paying "us" that brackets him with the run of the mill taxpayer who can only dream of a holiday in the Barbados, let alone 23 subsidiaries in tax havens.

Well, here's to you Rupert.

Bringing It On Home

Why Did I Even Leave?

Yes, why did I even leave Blogger four and a half years ago? At the time I needed a change. I was feeling stale and wanted to change the tone of my blogging.

People were telling me how good Wordpress was, and amongst other things, the Yankees had won the World Series in 2009 and it just seemed like the right time to wind up the previous Blog - 'Flaming Horses'. Thus I tottered off for new pastures and have been writing 'the Art Neuro Weblog' over there ever since, but recently I've come to miss a few things from Blogger - namely a proper search function. If there's one thing Blogger can boast, it's a search function powered by Google itself, and so it seems one is crazy not to avail one self of this strength.

Five years ago when Wordpress was still young, it was more of a purist writing thing - at least for me - and a lli wanted to do was write in a more writerly manner rather than the social graffiti mannerI had been pursuing until then. I've now come to the conclusion this was a wrong choice. The power of blogging is reflected in social reach and not how witty I can be on a page that hardly anybody reads.

They're really not good enough reasons on their own and today, I think that I might have even missed an opportunity for something while I've been there. In the intervening years Google has decided to offer up things like Google+ and ways of linking things into your YouTube channel. It flips me out that more people pass through the pages of 'Flaming Horses' (which I abandoned four and a half years ago), than they do my current Wordpress blog (even with all the tags on every article!).

These are great and wonderful things that I haven't quite embraced because I was over there and not over here. I blogged a bit more about politics and wrote a few more self-important things but really, I want to feel a little less like an amateur columnist and more of a proper blogger. Run free and breezy with the dogs (and puppy photos or whatever).

The upshot of all this is that I'm in the middle of moving across my four-and-a-half-years' worth of Wordpress-blogging back to Blogger, right here on this blog where it all started. I've even rolled in 'the Speacefreaks Blog' and 'Flaming Horses' as well as other minor blogs such as'What Did We Do Before Wikipedia' and 'Spacefreaks Redux'.

Anyway, all this is to say I hope to be back here by the end of this month.

Google vs. China

Do No Evil

China's IT brigade tried hacking Google. In response, Google is going to stop its censoring of content as retaliation. In the mid-term Google is likely to pull out of China.

GOOD FOR Google. The company's decision to stop censoring its Chinese search engine is more likely to mean the end of its China-based service than a breakdown of Beijing's political firewall. But more important than the question of whether Google.cn survives is the larger issue that Google has now raised for other Western companies and democratic governments -- which is whether China's gross and growing abuse of the Internet should be quietly tolerated or actively resisted.

Google cited a major instance of that abuse in announcing its policy change: "a highly sophisticated and targeted attack" on Google and more than 20 other large companies aimed at stealing software code. "A primary goal of the attackers," Google said, was breaking into the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

This is shocking but unsurprising. Cyberattacks from China aimed at U.S. businesses, the Pentagon and other government agencies have become commonplace, if not epidemic, in recent years. So have Beijing's demands that Western companies collaborate in its efforts to censor political content on the Internet and snoop on the private e-mails of its citizens, several of whom have been prosecuted with e-mails supplied by Yahoo. China aims not just at eliminating the free speech and virtual free assembly that are inherent to the Internet, but at turning it into a weapon that can be used against democrats and democratic societies.

They have 24 million marriageable men with no access to internet porn. It's a powder keg waiting to explode out there! :) It's really strange how china keeps on making the news with such negative reports so regularly. Maybe not so much surprising - a bit like Mark McGwire's admissions of steroid use - but strange it's happening now. We're suddenly seeing bastards for what they are.

Perplexed With The Google-Plex

The Shoe On The Other Foot

It hurts when you can't manipulate the market like you used to. At least, that's the message I'm getting from this article in the SMH.

With nearly 10 million visitors a month Google is the most visited website in Australia. Nine out of every 10 searches made on the internet is through Google. Those eyeballs translate into an estimated 90 per cent share of search advertising - the fastest growing area in online advertising as the number of advertisers using the service soars close to 50,000 in Australia. Google's revenue is estimated to be $700 million and fast heading towards $1 billion as more advertisers divert their budgets into a medium that delivers them measurability and sales leads. Soon Google will have the ability to sell and serve richer display brand ads on 62 per cent of Australian websites. A suite of products from maps and mobile phone applications to computer operating systems, video traffic on YouTube and cheap telephone calls only helps rust consumers onto the Google brand.

The more time we spend on the internet, and hence on Google, the more money it makes. All of which is making the Australian media, already grappling with the structural changes the internet has wrought on it, deeply uncomfortable. Now it is plotting its revenge; how it goes about exacting it is another thing altogether. But while Google's monopoly of information is not in doubt, to date there is scant evidence of Google using its muscle to distort the market, only a fear that it might do so in the near future. That has not stopped a growing chorus of voices expressing concern at Google's dominance, but such is the might of Google, few are prepared to go on the record. Telstra's Sensis, News Limited, Ninemsn and Microsoft all declined to publicly air their grievances because some of them still do business with Google.

One that did, though, is the man who arguably has the most to lose from Google's continued dominance and the most to gain from its downfall: Rohan Lund, the chief executive of Yahoo7!, Google's main competitor in search.

He says all he can see is a future where the Google Death Star, as he dubs it, will reign supreme. "There needs to be a conversation in industry and government about Google's role in the market and what this means for business and consumers both now and in the future,'' Lund says, adding that Google may now be Australia's largest media company by reach and profit.

''Commentators in the US are concerned that Google has a 60 per cent share. Let's not forget that in Australia that climbs to nearly 90 per cent share, even after the Yahoo! and Microsoft search businesses join forces."

I'm going to digress a bit and talk about the example set by the music industry.

Once upon a long time ago, Robert Fripp the guitarist from King Crimson folded up his band in 1975. There were many reasons to his decision, but one of the ones he discussed was the nature of technology pointing in a different direction to the way the music industry was structured. Through 1975-1980, Robert Fripp expressed the view that the music business with big Rock bands going on tour was a dinosaur and only small intelligent units were going to survive the technological changes.

As such, he saw his own band as an unwieldy contraption that was not going to survive and proceeded to build a catalogue of albums as a solo musician working small partnership. When King Crimson returned, it was as a stripped-down 4 piece with a more technology-driven approach.

Since then, Robert Fripp has been shown to be right. As technology changed, the music industry was found to be a dinosaur as small intelligent units - mp3 players and pirated music files destroyed the business model of the record labels. The key of course was distribution. Which is why this bit caught my eye:

''Distribution is key. Once you start locking up distribution your reach gets bigger, then the revenue per search gets bigger and then as that gets bigger the more you are able to pay others to lock up distribution,'' says Lund, who has spoken out despite pleas from Google for him to remain silent on the matter.

It doesn't matter what you sell, whether it is advertising space or little discs that make music when placed in a player, distribution of your product and service is the most important aspect of any business.

If anything, the advertising industry should be in more shock than the media that provides competing ad space. If you had a small business providing a very specific service, then it is far more effective to place an ad through Google than it is to place it in any media outlet. If you had a meager advertising budget, the place you should put that money is Google. Everything else is relatively speculative compared to the certainty of Google Ads.

The fact of the matter is, there are numerous companies on the planet that do offer very specific goods and services that can now reach a wider target through the internet and especially through Google.

Another way of putting it is that the advent of technology has made sure that the media advertising space has been found out to be overpriced for the effectiveness they possess. The only good that advertising space in Newspapers and Free-to-Air TV can achieve would be branding and specific announcements, while carefully targeted adverting all takes place through the internet - and in particular through Google.

But even with branding ads, Google has something coming:

Google has yet more weapons in its armoury. Later this year when it turns on its DoubleClick ad serving platform - which it bought for $US3.1 billion in 2007 - it will be able to serve up display ads, such as banners, pop-ups and videos, to advertisers who are looking to do brand ads online. To date, Google's focus has been on selling search keywords to advertisers and text ads to small businesses. DoubleClick, which serves and measures the effectiveness of display ads to half the websites in the world with more than 1 million unique monthly visitors, delivers Google advertisers from the big end of town. It also pits it once more against its key customers; the publishers and the media-buying agencies who each year earn their bread and butter from a market worth $500 million a year. Google insists it is not about to cut their grass and that its priority in Australia is on building search advertising revenues. It adds that, even it it wanted to, it doesn't have the skill sets of either a publisher or a media agency to undertake such a task.

But, as one internet advertising veteran, who asked for anonymity, says: ''What worries them [the media] is the sheer volume and quality of data about customers that Google will own and how that can be used in other advertising models. There's a real danger that Google does everything that they do only they'd do it much better and more efficiently.''

I would hate to be in the print ad or TV ad business going forwards. It's like working for Kodak Film in an age of digital photography by the masses. And I keep thinking Robert Fripp had it absolutely right - technology has slain the dinosaurs.