If I ran the ACCC (The Group of Four).....

For those not in the wonderful country of Australia, we have an odd situation here in terms of IP connectivity.

In most of the world, there are carriers who call themselves "Tier 1" who are deserving of the title - they have world-wide networks, own prodigious amounts of international and domestic capacity and provide services at a reasonable price. These companies achieve such status via success in business - they've become successful by running their companies well and providing products that have captured a market. Even "near Tier 1" carriers have become impressive by the same means.

In Australia, things are a little bit different.

Here we have this delightful monstrosity called The Group of Four. In 1998 the ACCC decided that they would react to various grumbles by other carriers and force four carriers to engage in peering, creating the GoF. for those not interested in Wikipedia's ramblings, the four carriers today are:

• Telstra
• Optus
• AAPT
• Verizon Business

As a result of the ACCC's decision over a decade ago, if any other organisation or individual wishes to provide guaranteed access to or from all areas of the internet that terminates within Australia, they have to (directly or indirectly) source connectivity from one of these companies. The impact of this braindead truth is a bit worrying, in a number of ways:

• Two very large residential ISPs (iiNet and TPG) provide inferior access to their customers to many domestic destinations. Instead of connecting to a GoF member at each of their state Points of Presence, they instead only provide connectivity in Sydney (and in Perth in the case of iiNet, only because they wanted to satisfy WoW addicts). Obviously this choice is a business decision, not a technical one.
• One most excellent carrier (Internode) connects to Optus in almost every state and Verizon in Sydney. Ironically, this can cause inferior access paths to be presented to customers due to the way BGP works. As good as this is for customers in terms of service, it surely drives up Internode's provisioning costs, eating into their profits and resulting in higher prices for customers out of simple business sense.
• Telstra and Optus have significantly lower network costs than any other provider of residential services thanks to their significant access network assets coupled with their completely free access to the  Australian internet. In every case, a host within Australia is a customer, a customer of one of their three settlement-free peers or a customer of one of the two previous groups of company. AAPT's sale of their residential customer base and Verizon's absence from the residential market allows them to concentrate on the more lucrative business space.

All that said, the title of this post is "If I ran the ACCC...". So, without further ado, I would:

• Forcibly dissolve the Group of Four, divulging the details of the agreement brought about in 1998 to the public.
• Require that peering at at least one peering point with an MPLA with an opening peering policy that existed on January 1st, 2011 in a given State or Territory be a requirement for any access to the NBN and associated services in said State or Territory.
• Require that peering at at least one peering point with an MPLA with an opening peering policy that existed on January 1st, 2011 in a given State or Territory be a requirement for any access to radio spectrum auctions.
• Require that peering at at least one peering point with an MPLA with an opening peering policy that existed on January 1st, 2011 in a given State or Territory be a requirement for any awarding of construction contracts for the NBN (yes, I'm looking at you Nextgen Networks).
• Require that utilisation graphs for links to MPLA-governed peering internet exchanges be made public by all participating carriers, to ensure that salespeople do not become the solution to congestion problems.

Before anyone thinks I'm mad, let's look at the arguments against my suggestions:

• But the GoF will have their businesses impacted - No, they won't. Companies that are stupid enough to buy business services directly from any of these companies will continue to be stupid enough to do so. Residential customers of similar inclination will continue to be similarly inclined. Given the treatment carriers receive when attempting to source services from the GoF, it's quite clear that such business arrangements aren't too valuable to the GoF, and my proposed points have precisely zero impact on non-transit products.
• But you're swapping one government-created cartel for another! Equinix, Pipe/TPG and WAIA will be the new Group of Three - If I was to show up and tell David Teoh, Simon Hackett, Michael Malone, Ravi Bhatia and John Linton that they could stop paying Optus, Telstra, Verizon and AAPT for domestic transit, I'm sure they'd provide space in their various PoPs across the country for interconnection free of charge in some sort of non-profit structure. Better yet, we'll just look back in Australia's internet history and ask AARNet nicely to provide a neutral peering option.
• Investment in telecommunications will be stalled thanks to large players having less power - yes, these changes that will result in more competition will disincline the government to spend $43 billion, or not.

Of course, if anyone has any counterpoints to my arguments, I would love to hear them.