IAA Newsletters

This month we have the usual round of upgrades and expansion projects and have kicked off the review of our governance. It’s been great to see thoughts coming in from members on what is important for how we operate and what matters to you in our governance. Thank you to those who have made their thoughts known, so please keep them coming as we work our way through the review. Please keep an eye on our web page on Updating our Governance.

Speaking of thoughts, it’s amazing also to see the list of issues coming in on regulation topics! From defamation to take-downs there are a bunch of likely regulation changes coming through and we are keen to put your point of view forward. Please don’t hesitate to let us know whether you like the regulation changes, or worry for the impact on your business.

The Perth team went on a tour of that flash new NextDC site, P2, so now we’re keen to hear whether members think we should be in there. It looks so nice and shiny; it will be hard to stay away!

Well, that was quite a month, wasn’t it? The floods certainly had us worried about our east coast connectivity, and luckily we lost only one of the fibre runs. That run was successfully restored once the fibre crews could reach it safely and we experienced no related down time though I admit my knuckles were a little white for a time! I’m glad too that our Australia-wide intercapital project is over, so we now have redundant paths between all the IXes. We’ve not been slacking, though as the tech team also recently upgraded Adelaide to increase the 10G ports, activated even more capacity into Amazon and set up a nice new L-root presence in the east.

What has put me into a state of complete despair, however, are the recent disclosures from the Federal political scene. Over my years of interactions with politicians and Canberra lobbyists of all varieties, I have always jokingly said that it wasn’t safe to party on drinking with them, but my fears were based purely on the risks from extreme alcohol consumption! Members should be assured, however, that once some form of dignity is reinstated in Canberra we will champion your views again. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait too long – we deserve so much better from our representatives and system of government.

Our own industry has had its own criticism, however, with the Human Rights Commission’s 2018 finding that “four out of five people working in information, media and telecommunications reported being sexually harassed”, so we certainly have our own path to travel. On that basis, the IAA board adopted a Code of Conduct for Events, one for the Board itself, and I have made a personal commitment to all IAA staff to ensure a healthy, safe and harassment free workplace with mechanisms to back that up, and we did all of this before the recent disclosures from Canberra. If members would like to further discuss this topic, or look to strategies for industry-wide improvement, please feel free to be in touch. One specific industry initiative we are newly supporting is that of a Women in Tech WA (WiTWA) sponsorship, and we are actively working with other potential partners, too.

Speaking of governance, the IAA board recently met to review the organisation’s strategic directions, including architectural standards, and we are close to finalising a new strategic plan. One topic that came up is that of updating our corporate structure from the current West Australian Association’s law to federal corporation’s law. If we were to do this, then a process of member consultation will be followed, so your views on our corporate governance are sought. Rest assured, the board is fully committed to remaining a not-for-profit, member driven association and our roots firmly remain in Western Australia.

Best wishes

Narelle

This month we announced member eligibility for the ACCC broadband monitoring program, said goodbye to a piece of IAA history and showed off our new lab.

Read the full newsletter here.

Well, hasn’t this year started with a bang! Who expected industry regulation (in the form of the News Media Code) to be everyone’s family catch up topic this month? Not since Wikipedia went dark have we seen such a stand from a major tech player on a regulatory issue.

We have had some success in our advocacy, too. Members are now being invited to participate in the ACCC broadband measurement program, and we’ve heard good news from members who participated in our round table with NBN Co on their onboarding challenges. Our next regulatory challenge will be Home Affairs’ “codesign process” for critical infrastructure regulation, so please send me your thoughts on that one.

We’ve also seen some great uptake of 100Gbps ports in the wake of us dropping the setup fees. In addition, members should also consider installing redundant links across exchanges to ensure service continuity, particularly into Cloud services. On that note, we’re happy to announce Amazon have expanded to ensure redundancy and capacity, and members wishing to peer and use Amazon services should get in touch with them pronto! If you’re on WA-IX or VIC-IX in particular, new capacity is available.

It was great to see our Tech Team Leader, Nick Pratley, clean out all the older gear and clutter in Perth’s QV1, too. A big thank you to our members who assisted with relieving us of the old gear and keeping him well caffeinated! Get in touch also if you like the masks he was modelling.

Our New Zealand presence is also growing with services now active across Chorus to present peering right around the country. More site planning is going on over there, too, so stay tuned!

On the topic of expansion, we are still office hunting though optimistic we’ll get somewhere before our new Policy Officer (Intern) starts. All the regulation changes mean we need the extra support, and we will be able to assist members more with their (our!) regulatory burden.

Don’t forget to tune into Apricot next week – see Apricot.net for the program.

Let me wish a hearty welcome to 2021 to all our members and stakeholders. Already we have been planning some more upgrades, old equipment removals, online events and hopefully in person ones later this year. We’d also like to hear from any members thinking of downsizing your office space in the North Ryde (NSW) area, as some space for the team on the east coast would nicely supplement our west coast space.

This was certainly the year for optimism, yet already we have seen some interesting developments: borders up and down within Australia and across the ditch, insurrection in the US capital, and the Australian government move on a proposed news web publishing code. While border closures simply mean here at IAA we have planned and cancelled travel three times already, events in the US capital have other ramifications across our industry.

The insurrection led to a spate of ‘de-platforming’ incidents which in turn reflects the increase in infrastructure shutdowns, given that it wasn’t just the social media services that acted, but the upstream suppliers of authentication and compute platforms. Does this mean that in the future, Australian members may choose to switch off compute or other infrastructure for serious offenders? Or face their own service disconnections as a result of user actions? Aside from your general right to do business with whomever you choose (subject to anti-discrimination legislation), in Australia s313 of the Telecommunications Act requires us to do our “best” to prevent our networks and facilities from being used in the commission of offences, so it would appear that similar de-platforming would be within the law here.

The industry has, for some time, had clauses in contracts limiting liability where required to cease service at the request of law enforcement, but these cases of ‘de-platforming’ show just how far up the supply chain this can go. We encourage all members to review their terms and conditions and seek legal advice for your specific situation, for both upstream and downstream services. Ultimately, should you decide (or be required) to terminate customer services – you don’t want to be liable for damages.

On that note, I can only wonder where the proposal for Google and Facebook to pay when showing links to Australian news media articles will lead. Will we end up with all new Australian search engines? Will the big providers pay us for links to our own content? I doubt any of us will knock back that bit of extra revenue, but I can’t help but think this sounds a bit like the disintegration of the Internet as an open platform for innovation.

As ever, I am always keen to hear member thoughts on issues affecting the industry!

Narelle Clark

IAA CEO

This month we increased capacity in our major capital cities and announced a fantastic partnership for our friends at NZIX.

Read the full newsletter here.

This month we welcomed our new board members and asked members for their thoughts on NBN pricing changes.

Read the full newsletter here.

Well, here we are in the last gasps of 2020, and a year we’re glad to see the back of, that’s for sure! Over here at IAA, we’re getting those last few upgrades into place before the team head off for a bit of a break. It’s great to see those intercapital links coming on stream at last, with new capacity lighting up between Sydney and Melbourne as well as Melbourne and Adelaide. You’ll also be glad to hear that we’ve increased the capacity between our content networks so that your customers can all enjoy their streaming services full pelt over the holiday season. We’ve already seen an uptick of some 20Gbps throughput out of the most popular services!

Speaking of content, we have also just got the new Sourceforge mirror up, and soon we expect to see FreeBSD mirrored, as well as a new DNS root source on our network. Melbourne peers should also be enjoying the extra capacity into our Google cache by now, too.

We have had our last Life Under Lockdown event, and we are in the process of organising a member round table with the Minister for Communications’ office on the topic of NBN onboarding for RSPs. If you missed out on an invitation, do get in touch so that we can add you to our list.

Well, that’s it from me for the year. May you all have a much less stressful, far more profitable 2021.

Happy peering!

Narelle Clark