Aotearoa / New Zealand

Yes it was good with much improvement of services and competition since. My memory of the various issues may be blurry now but their was alot of unhappiness back then with Telecom. Corporations will always trend toward monopoly unless regulated against. The telco duopoly we had for some time after the networks taxpayers paid for in the first place was privatised, were barely in competition and they had a vested interest in keeping it that way of course. Unbundling the copper network took too long, and telecom had an interest in fibre rollout being slow early on. It was a painful time and eye opening when travelling to ‘developing’ nations in the mid 2000s to experience high speed virtually open access to ‘broadband’ as it was called when we were still begging for better than adsl (or was it still dial up?) to ‘surf the net’ as a chorus technician lazily called it after finally getting my service going once when I was trying to get a small software business communicating with overseas customers.

Was another entity Kordia? Or did that break from nzbc/tvnz/rnz ? I’ve lost track.

Gladly things are pretty good with speeds and access for what I need now. I have empathy for my friends in colleagues in Aus and some other ‘developed’ nations.

The google situation is massive and they need to be broken up, their mafia styled control of the ad auction and data harvesting industries needs to be cut down. They also have alot to answer for with how they've damaged our access to information which hopefully this will start to address. They’ve mutated the internet to fit their image in order to profit when the actual value of their product to their customers (advertisers) is highly questionable. Probably beyond the remit for this case , but a start. High hopes for the case, but stakes are huge for them and they're powerful.