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Singapore, I have a problem | Jun 22, 2007 20:54

There's always one in the room, and it happened to be me. After sitting through a CommunicAsia presentation from Australian lawyer Peter Waters, which was essentially him hating on Net Neutrality, scorning the bill to be presented to the US House and wildly misrepresenting the arguments in favour of some form of packet neutrality (chiefly, that it allows new internet content providers to compete on merit and innovation, not size of existing bankroll) I finally got to ask a couple of questions from the floor.

Surely, I put it to him, he was exaggerating: most proponents don't think every bit is sacred. Of course carriers should be able to guarantee quality of service if they sell a video-over-IP service to their customers; they can't rely on the best-effort internet for that.

What we don't want to do is let them create a two-tier internet service, where content from telcos, or their commercial partners, comes to us on the special internet and the little guy with a better idea gets second-class transport. In the world of discriminatory pricing, we'd miss out on YouTube and get some lame telco version instead.

Was there not a simple solution here? Yes, run any IP-based services you like. But unless you have packet neutrality, you can't call it the internet. We'll see what the consumer likes better.

I also took him up on his comments about peering. In New Zealand, I pointed out, the two major carriers had ceased open peering with anyone but each other, and basically broken the network. There were perverse routing decisions every day, and TVNZ had had to bring in Akamai to do national content distribution because it made more sense than paying the telcos for access to their customers.

He clearly did not, I suggested, act for many content providers. No, as it turned out, he didn't. He was Telstra Clear's lawyer in these very matters. Perhaps that was something he should have said at the start of his talk.

I would have liked to have asked some more questions: given his rationale -- telcos had to be allowed to gain enough revenue from their networks to permit new investment in capacity - what had the revenue outcome of de-peering been for TelstraClear? Did it lose or upset any major customers? Had revenue from new sales of circuits into its network covered the cost of say, every bit of data it had to haul back across the Pacific from New Zealand sites that couldn't afford to host in New Zealand, including large content providers like Radio New Zealand, which delivers to the Telecom and Telstra networks from a US mirror?

But the chairman had not yet heard enough of his own voice and there wasn't time for any more questions from anyone.

There was a part two of sorts when I heard an excellent presentation from Stuart Spiteri of Akamai the next day at Broadcast Asia. He told how he and his crew had done a little test the previous day: "racing" some data around Singapore. Oddly enough, he said, because the two big carriers, SingTel and StarHub, were so "competitive" - in other words, they won't peer sensibly - the fastest path between sites on either network a few kilometres apart was via the United States.

I asked him whether carriers' refusal to peer sensibly was a driver for Akamai's business and he said, well, this sort of thing happens all over the world. From the text provided for his presentation:

First of all, networks have little incentive to set up free peering arrangements, since there is no revenue generation opportunity in that type of arrangement, but there are considerable setup costs.

At the same time, none of the large networks is going to agree to pay another large network for peering, because from a traffic perspective, they would both benefit equally from such an arrangement. As a result, large networks end up not peering with each other very much and so the limited number of peering points between them end up as bottlenecks.

And such commercially-driven policies actually quite often have the effect of exposing carriers to data transport costs resulting from resulting from their action?

"Oh yes," said Spiteri. "That's why the telcos love us. It costs us very little, if anything, to be hosted in their data centres because we save them so much money."

Frankly a week at CommunicAsia has me not loving telcos. Hour after hour it was carriers blathering at each other, or being blathered at by consultants, about how content is king, and must be "compelling" and "exclusive" if consumers are to be wooed to new mobile and "quadruple play" IP services - without a single content person in the house. Not one.

Apart from Spiteri, the BBC's excellent Dr Chrichton Limbert (I've written him up for a Listener column), a useful briefing on social media by Joe Colgan of Spectrum Strategies, a talk from the CEO of Korea's mobile TV provider TU Media and purely technical presentations like that on spectrum management by Kordia's Ian Goodwin, the fare at the four separate, confusingly overlapping conferences here has been generally disappointing. As a frustrated audience member pointed out from the floor at the IPTV Forum, "this is all about you guys trying to defend entrenched positions."

I actively boycotted Friday's User-Generated Content forum, because it was so stupid. Check out the programme: a day on user content dominated by executives from Mediacorp, the monolithic company that owns, among other things, every single radio station in Singapore. The day was sponsored by Singapore's Media Development Authority, which is part of the same official system that makes Singapore's media the lamest in the region and bans satellite dishes. It would be a joke, if it were funny.

Conspicuously not invited: the Singapore's blogfather and creator of one of the best podcasts anywhere: Mr Brown. Look out for him in New Zealand in August, at the Bananas NZ Going Global conference and possibly elsewhere, and for coverage in Public Address Radio and The Listener. Top guy.

You may be deducing that I'm having a problem with Singapore. It's not like I'm not having a good time: the food and the shopping are great, and I had a top night on the turps with a member of the vast and shadowy Gracewood clan, but there's something about the place - where even creativity must be officially ordained - that really gives me the shits. There's too much authoritarian cruelty masquerading as a social contract here. The next time Mike Moore starts spouting off about how New Zealand should be much more like Singapore, could someone do me a favour and just slap him?

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Arrest the bastards at the border | Jun 20, 2007 01:53

It's not often I wholeheartedly agree with Winston Peters, but he has my endorsement for his impassioned Parliamentary speech in the wake of Fay and Richwhite buying their way out of an insider trading investigation. The $20 million payment to end the Securities Commission's case against them was less than a third of what they made selling off TranzRail shares in 2002, and a drop in the bucket of the enrichment they have accorded themselves - very often at the expense of their own shareholders - over the years.

I don't have the protection of Parliamentary privilege that Peters had yesterday, but I guess it's safe enough to repeat my usual line with respect to those two: arrest the bastards at the border. I'm not fussy what for. My objections to them are moral, rather than strictly legal.

It's not just a matter of what they did to the New Zealand public when they played both sides of National's privatisations, but what they did to the concept of investment in this country. The fact that there may yet be some people who still consider the pair of them heroes utterly defeats me.

There has been a spirited debate under David's post as to whether the arrest of Millie Elder is news. I'm afraid it is. You might even say it is so as a result of the Faustian pact her father made with the gossip press. John Campbell's extreme sensitivity about going public with his family looks all the more prudent now.

But even if you've never engaged with celebrity culture, if you are even moderately well-known, certain forms of misfortune striking your or your loved ones will be news. It's a matter of demand. The biggest enduring spike in traffic on Public Address took place before the 2005 general election. But the campaign itself did not cause the spike: it was the now done-and-dusted celebrity drug scandal. I led with commentary on it three days running, and y'all came in your hordes.

What doesn't need to happen is the system confusing sizzle with public interest and throwing itself open merely because journalists want story and pictures. Judge Deobhakta's comments in court were apposite.

If that "Faustian pact" reference reads like a criticism of Paul Holmes, I should also add that I think he'd be a very good Dad to have at a time like this. A man who has stumbled himself knows the score. As a parent, my sympathy goes to him and Hine. This stuff's hard enough without being in the middle of a circus.

I don't know Millie; or, rather, I haven't known her since shortly after she was born. I actually moved out of my flat in London to make room for her arrival, and I have this jarring idea in my head of an innocent baby up on drugs and receiving charges. (I also can't get over how much she looks like her mother did then.) As the judge noted, small-time P busts are commonplace -- there are plenty of twentysomethings having a dabble there without significant consequence -- but whether not the receiving charges are sound, being in the same house as 30 grand's worth of stolen property suggests that, as they say, she has fallen in with a bad crowd.

On another sad note, Matt Watson, aka DJ Big Matt, aka the nicest man in reggae, was laid to rest this week, having lost his battle with gastric cancer. My thoughts are with his family. He was a truly good man, and his taste in music was magnificent. It sounds like his funeral was a big one, and he deserved it. He'll be much missed.

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Dinner in District 2 | Jun 18, 2007 15:24

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District 2, Ho Ch Minh City, is only a five-minute ferry ride across the Saigon River from the central city, but it's another world: a farming village and market street accreted over the last two or three decades, it has not a jot of the bustle of the city across the water. In the evening, kids play, delicious marinated quails sit on a hot plate, and everyone seems relaxed.

But not for much longer. In three years, all this will be gone: the government is taking the land, paying the compensation it sees fit to owners (ie: about a third of its real commercial value) and laying the foundations for a shining new city. The ferry will be joined by a tunnel.

We crossed the river on Saturday night to the home of Mitchell's parents, two lovely, enterprising people whose compound has been the base for a string of businesses over the years - from ice cream to electricity infrastructure.

The same system of dams that allow residents to manage floods (they are barely above river level) can also be set to usher little fish into the pond surrounding the pagoda built by Mitchell's father to house the family's Buddhist and ancestral shrines (Vietnamese Buddhists do not worship their ancestors, but, like Maori, they do remember and consult them). We caught the fish with lumps of bread on little fishhooks, and they became a delicious entrée: deep-fried till crunchy and eaten whole.

Being welcomed into someone's home is precious when you're travelling - hotels, restaurants and meetings drive you a bit mad sometimes - and I was grateful both for the fabulous meal and the genuine hospitality.

I think I'd like to go back to Vietnam. It's an interesting place, and every conversation I had made it seem more interesting. I had a couple of beers with Kevin Miller, an ebullient Japanese-American former Peace Corps volunteer who came here to teach IT courses, evangelises Linux, writes a blog and is now starting his own company (that's what everyone does here; in the South at least).

He reeled off so many observations about social culture that I was moved to observe that this endless peeling of layers of the onion seemed to be the basis of his affection for the place. In terms of blog culture, it seems the young Vietnamese start out with MySpace and step up to Yahoo 360. Blogger's not really a factor.

We met at a bar in the backpacker area. Later on when I strolled around the same part of town, I was offered, in a conversation with a personable young man (which took place two metres away from two of the green-uniformed trainee traffic police who no one seems to respect), I was progressively offered marijuana, opium, mushrooms and ecstasy ("from Amsterdam"). It appears that if it's not heroin, the government's not too bothered. If I was 23 and with my mates, I'd probably think I was in party heaven.

I am surprised at the degree of admiration I felt for the communist Vietnamese government. This is a government of authoritarians, but not plutocrats, and what they have achieved since the Doi Moi (Renovation) reforms began in 1986 is in so many ways remarkable.

Less than two decades ago these people were pretty much starving: now Vietnam is the second biggest exporter of rice in the world; the government subsequently concentrated on coffee, and Vietnam is now the world's second-largest exporter of that too. But last week, the government ordered exporters to stop taking new orders - farmers are making 80% margins, but the country needs the rice to fill domestic demand. You keep coming across something akin to a rehabilitation of the command economy in Vietnam.

A local venture capitalist I spoke to had 16 companies, all developing consumer-focused internet ideas, on his books. He said the government made it clear it had learned from its neighbours' experiences and did not simply want to be the next cheapest destination for IT outsourcing. It knew that someone cheaper would eventually come along. Vietnam, with its 90% literacy rate, wants to be higher up the value chain.

Yet set against this new enlightenment has been this year's crackdown on dissidents - the worst in years. Last month, two human rights lawyers were jailed for four and five years respectively, after a court found them guilty of spreading propaganda intended to undermine the government. A Catholic priest got five years, along with three members of a banned political party.

Strangely, this happens at a time when the leadership is young and from the South, where revolutionary fervour has never been as strong. And the voice of pluralism has come, ironically, from one of the old men of the revolution, former prime minister 87 year-old Vo Van Kiet:

Mr Kiet, a former Politburo member, said the authorities must not avoid "talking to those who have a different view" on Vietnamese politics, and he added that "the dialogue should be honest".

He warned the government "not to execute administrative measures" in its dealings with the dissidents.

As it stands, in their daily lives, people have rights and protections, but that does not extend to the right to rock the boat: you can criticise the fulfilment of policy, very occasionally policy itself (a wave of wildcat industrial action in 2005 induced the government to raise the minimum wage), but not the party. There is no real free press.

Will it change? It seems inevitable. So many young Vietnamese (and this is a young population) are being educated, some in democratic countries, and being exposed to the marketplace of ideas. There were 74 channels on the TV in my middling Saigon hotel, and I was unable to trigger any sort of blockage from the hotel's internet connection. The comparison with other countries in the region - China, which last week blocked all images from Flickr in case someone saw Tiananmen Square; Malaysia, whose communications minister summarily banned YouTube; and Singapore, which engages in various petty acts of internet censorship - is instructive.

The other looming problem is the environment. The environmental problems brought about by poverty are being compounded by the environmental problems of prosperity. With material wealth comes motorised transport, and even with the government's deliberately prohibitive 200% sales tax on cars, the streets are teeming with motorbikes and air quality is deteriorating. Yet it will only be prosperity that pays for a proper sewage system for Saigon.

So now we're in Singapore: tidy, sleek Singapore where the streets do not teem and the footpaths are clean. If you're ever thinking of staying at the Royal @ Queens Hotel, think about staying somewhere else. And if you can't, be prepared to demand a room change. My conference-rate booking got me a room where the hotel air-conditioning system hummed gratingly through the wall, but where neither the air-conditioning or the fridge actually worked, and where the towels in the bathroom were so threadbare that I tore one drying myself after a shower. I got myself moved. Card-readers in the left and room doors work only fitfully. This is a tired, tired hotel trading on a four-star rating it will not deserve until its owner spends some money renovating it. Still, can't moan. Much.

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Elsewhere, it appears that the people around Tony Blair have started to talk. The Observer has led with the sizzle from the two-part TV doco on the Blair years by its own columnist, Andrew Rawnsley. That sizzle being that while he was publicly expressing his resolve before and during the Iraq project, Blair was, with his advisors, despairing of the incompetence, pig-headedness and lack of planning of the American leadership. Everything you thought was true apparently becomes patent: Bush was in charge on only a token basis, and Cheney and Rumsfeld didn't listen to anyone. The final paragraph of Rawnsley's accompanying column sums up the tragedy of Iraq quite well:

The casualties of war are to be found not just in Iraq. The deaths will also be counted in Darfur and future Darfurs, Rwandas and Bosnias, where murderous regimes will put people to the slaughter with much less to fear from western intervention. That is the most rending victim of Iraq.

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Modern Endeavour | Jun 15, 2007 13:23

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Quang Trung Software City reminded me of two other places I've been: the park around the old film studio in Wroclaw in eastern Poland, and Avalon in the Hutt Valley. In other words, it is both a memoir of socialism and a slightly retro testament to modern endeavour.

The terms offered by the people's committee of Ho Chi Minh City - 50 year leases, an array of generous financial breaks - are intended to encourage construction, and there are shiny new buildings dotted amongst the scruff of old military barracks and unmown grass. It doesn't quite look like the Powerpoint presentation -- yet -- but the plans are impressive.

I have my doubts about the integrity of some of the buildings: one that we visited, owned by a company that runs a training course for embedded programmers who contract to spend at least two years coding 12 hours a day for Japanese electronics companies - looked to have leaky building syndrome. It was kind of empty, but they're building another next door.

I spent quite a bit of the day (including lunch and dinner) with the Augen Vietnam staff, who struck me as a really nice bunch of kids; several of them are already interacting directly with New Zealand clients and making design decisions. Some of the companies at Quang Trung are coding sausage factories; this clearly isn't. Bonus points: one of the staff made round two of Vietnam Idol.

Today we're having lunch with Mark Fraser, a New Zealand lawyer with a practice here, and in the afternoon I'll try and hook up with a local blogger. In between, I think it's market shopping time. Tomorrow, a group of us are taking a boat down river to the coast, where we will ride motorbikes, swim and play beach football (the two fat white guys -- "strong", the kids say diplomatically -- have already been designated in goal). Then it's dinner with Mitchell's family and guests, to which I am greatly looking forward.

Anyway, you should read Graham Reid's very nice post about Vietnam and I should be getting about my business.

There are some pictures from the last two days in the gallery for this post. And I took a little movie of some street scooter action. This is actually relatively restrained.

Oh, and screw Ihug. Again. Apart from a brief, glorious hour when I was actually able to both send and receive email from my Ihug accounts, it's gone again. This is very rotten indeed.

Songs I'm loving on the road: Patti Smith's version of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' from 12 - she's one cool old lady; Jimi Hendrix's version of 'Like a Rolling Stone' at Monterey Pop (now available on emusic!); Santo Gold's version of the Jam's 'Pretty Green' off the choice new Mark Ronson album; and, just so it's not all cover versions, MIA's 'Boyz'.

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From Saigon | Jun 14, 2007 12:39

Marking my first night in Vietnam by going to a Lebanese restaurant seemed counter-intuitive. Shouldn't I being having Pho, not falafel? In the event, my marinated and slow-grilled whole river trout was outstanding, and Warda restaurant itself, staffed entirely by locals (I guess they have the French in common with the Lebanese) was quite a place: decked out in a campy blues-and-oranges take on Middle Eastern décor.

Our host was the New Zealand consul general Peter Healy, a man who clearly loves where he lives. As a NZTE employee he is, not unexpectedly, a big proponent of New Zealand business coming to Vietnam.

He said that whenever someone asks him about the risks of investing here, he says that he's never heard of a New Zealand company dropping a couple of billion dollars here, but he can think of three that have managed it in Australia, where New Zealand businesses still flatter themselves they can compete.

What Vietnam offers, he says, is "scale and speed": back home, you can't go from 100 employees to 6000. Here, it's an option. And, as my companion Mitchell Pham points out, here, a New Zealand company can still turn up and make a difference: China and India are just too big now. Here, you can get a decent hotel room for $US80 a night. In Bangalore these days, it's all $500 and $1000. And still, the news back home is all Anglo-

Saigon District 1 speaks of fast money and lots of it. Shops packed with Louis Vuitton and Gucci sit around the corner from market stalls stocked with facsimiles thereof. Flat-screen Sony Wega TV sets sit stacked onj grubby footpaths. The fast money - fruit of torrents of investment capital and a 9% GDP growth rate - isn't all spread around.

Earlier, Mitchell and I had a beer on the roof of the Majestic Hotel, which was built by the French and is full of so much art nouveau leadlighting that you figure it has to be fake, but it isn't. The roof overlooks the Saigon River, whose port fixtures wind far away out of sight. The pretty, salmon-coloured pavilion built by the French as the original port centre is still there, dwarfed by what has happened since.

It's hot, really hot. The noisy air-conditioning unit in my room can crank the in-room temperature down to about 28 degrees through the middle of the day if I keep it running, which I do, by slipping my driver's licence in the slot for the room key when I go out, to keep the power on.

We have a huge today today, with various meetings and interviews at Quang Trung Software City, the business park where Mitchell's company, Augen, has set up its Vietnam office. I'm in reasonable shape though. It was nice to be reminded that not all international travel is as gruelling as going to "code orange" America, and not all airports are festering great abattoirs like LAX. Indeed, the transit facility at Changi, where I whiled away three hours between flights, is a big, glamorous shopping mall with free wi-fi and unlimited people-watching.

Entry through Vietnamese immigration was a breeze, although, even after bargaining my taxi driver down by half, I still outed myself as a total rube. It was worth it for the ride. We got barely 20 metres before nearly wiping out a motorcyclist, but the driver made up time impressively by driving large stretches of the journey at speed on the wrong side of the road.

I had some photographs and a short movie of the 5pm scooter stampede, but I've run out of time and we have to head for Quang Trung, so they'll have to wait. Text it is. Bye!

PS: How absolutely classic that Ihug should manage to screw up both POP mail retrieval and their webmail service while I'm away (this may also explain why my smtp wouldn't authenticate yesterday). What on earth is going on there? Anyone who really needs to get hold of me is welcome to contact Fiona for my gmail address.

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