I think the ACCC actually hasn't been that great for a while, unfortunately. We have awesome consumer protection, but they've made serious missteps more recently, especially under their current commissioner, Rod Simms.
They made a terrible ruling forcing the NBN to have 121 points of interconnect (basically peering POPs) back in 2009 (originally, NBN Co wanted to have 14), to protect the seven or so long-distance fibre providers. In the meantime, these providers merged with each other so now we only have three, and the 121 POI policy made it extremely difficult for smaller ISPs to compete on the NBN, because most couldn't afford transit to all of them, so we saw huge consolidation in the ISP space. So the ACCC ruling directly caused a reduction in competition in the ISP space, and it didn't help prevent what they were trying to prevent in the transit market either!
Then, look to the insanity of the media bargaining code. May have been some coercion from some Government donors behind the scenes there, who knows... But at the end of the day, which there were some legitimate concerns about Google and Facebook, most of their conclusions didn't really make sense (they conflated what actually happens, where Google and Facebook publish a link and one-sentence excerpt as if it was the same as publishing the whole article, and their solution was to force Google and Facebook to pay money to the big media organisations, which just happen to be big donors of the political party in power). The resulting law was so bad that Facebook threatened to pull out of the country altogether and removed news from Australian timelines for a while, until the bill was watered down.
In terms of these policies, the ACCC strikes me as not having a great deal of competence, but at the same having huge delusions of grandeur. I really don't want to see another episode like the tiff with Facebook, where even though Facebook do super scummy things and I generally dislike them, in that circumstance they were absolutely in the right...
I vaguely recall being angry at the ACCC about a bunch of other things over the years, but I can't remember any specifics - will have to try and look it up. I think it was blocking some mergers that wouldn't have reduced competition, but then approving some that posed potential serious damaging consequences to the market etc.
At least there's still a bunch trying to do the right thing by the people as a whole rather than the people currently in charge. I agree the ACCC has been a little hit and miss lately, but its one of the few good things we still have. I'm really hoping they leave medicare alone as much as possible.
Then again, somehow Newscorp got their way vs. facebook/google - only fair the ACCC does too.
They made a terrible ruling forcing the NBN to have 121 points of interconnect (basically peering POPs) back in 2009 (originally, NBN Co wanted to have 14), to protect the seven or so long-distance fibre providers. In the meantime, these providers merged with each other so now we only have three, and the 121 POI policy made it extremely difficult for smaller ISPs to compete on the NBN, because most couldn't afford transit to all of them, so we saw huge consolidation in the ISP space. So the ACCC ruling directly caused a reduction in competition in the ISP space, and it didn't help prevent what they were trying to prevent in the transit market either!
Then, look to the insanity of the media bargaining code. May have been some coercion from some Government donors behind the scenes there, who knows... But at the end of the day, which there were some legitimate concerns about Google and Facebook, most of their conclusions didn't really make sense (they conflated what actually happens, where Google and Facebook publish a link and one-sentence excerpt as if it was the same as publishing the whole article, and their solution was to force Google and Facebook to pay money to the big media organisations, which just happen to be big donors of the political party in power). The resulting law was so bad that Facebook threatened to pull out of the country altogether and removed news from Australian timelines for a while, until the bill was watered down.
In terms of these policies, the ACCC strikes me as not having a great deal of competence, but at the same having huge delusions of grandeur. I really don't want to see another episode like the tiff with Facebook, where even though Facebook do super scummy things and I generally dislike them, in that circumstance they were absolutely in the right...
I vaguely recall being angry at the ACCC about a bunch of other things over the years, but I can't remember any specifics - will have to try and look it up. I think it was blocking some mergers that wouldn't have reduced competition, but then approving some that posed potential serious damaging consequences to the market etc.