Is the news media bargaining code a victory for all Australian news content producers, or is it just big tech versus big news media? Over the past few months, the Australian Government and ‘tech giants’ have been at odds over the (soon to be implemented) News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code. The stated motivation for this code is “… to address a bargaining power imbalance that exists between digital platforms and Australian news businesses which was identified in the Final Report of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Digital Platforms Inquiry.” Essentially, the Australian Government decided that Australian news content providers were not being compensated adequately, which sounds reasonable on face value.
The tug of war over which companies should be allowed to have their technology built into the heart of the world’s 5G network cores is spilling over to the wider tech industry, with firms such as Broadcom and even Google at risk of suffering business harm. 5G is going to become incredibly crucial to the very fabric of our modern society, so there’s a lot at stake. I’m sure you know the background, but just to recap. Under Chinese law, the Chinese Government can compel Chinese companies to provide access to their technologies and data. Huawei maintains that it would ignore any such instruction, but is that realistic? Can anyone really envision a Chinese firm not bowing to a diktat from their communist leaders in Beijing? This is at the heart of concerns in many Western countries.
One of the biggest IT issues ongoing at present is the Australian Government’s My Health Record project. It was designed as an opt-in service, where you would have to explicitly provide a healthcare provider with authority to create a record on your behalf. The primary benefit of the service was that a ‘single source of truth’ copy of your medical records (or a summary of them) would be available to any health provider nationally. So if you were away from home within Australia and required treatment, your records would be available to medical professionals, who would be able to learn your medical history, allergies etc, with the idea being that you would receive better and more appropriate medical care as a result. Unfortunately, the benefits of the service were not well sold to the public, and the percentage of people …