Verity Pravda

The second question posed is "What, if any, regulatory obstacles exist to realising the full potential of Australia's digital economy?" At one level the answer to this is the answer to the earlier question about whether the laws need changing.

But at a higher level of abstraction the impedments can be seen in the way e go about making laws. Is the Department actively seeking out the economic, social and technical developments of which they need to be informed to advise the Minister of policy directions, or just sitting back waiting for direction from Government. Are the remits of the ACCC and ACMA sufficient to deal to any unfolding issues?

I think the answer to these is that the Department isn't keeping up to date - the approach to the blog, the handling of the filtering policy, the absence of any DE discussion till now make that pretty clear. And while the ACCC and ACMA will make the occassional flurry the bulk of their work is all about the minutiae of implementing the rules for the circuit switched world.

The discussion opener then asks the bloggers whether we are aware of anything else out there in terms of regulatory frameworks. This really disappoints me. I thought what the Government paid the public servants for was to do this kind of research. How hard is it?

Finally (until it is fixed) my apolgy to posts following my last post. An unclosed tag to put the title of a book in italics has made verything from that point on - including other posts - italic.