Growing pains

Here at Rabid Reseller we were mightily heartened by opposition leader Kim Beazley’s proposal to filter out porn from the Internet before it even leaves the ISP.

Rabid has been so concerned about the amount of porn on the Internet that we’ve been doing our own bit to alleviate the problem.

The main thrust of our strategy has been to download every bit of porn we can find, thus making it no longer available to anyone else. But we’re fighting a losing battle, and it’s taking up more disk space than we can afford to lose in the next stocktake.

We’re also worried about the amount of smutty spam delivered daily to our inbox. Just this morning we got another ten spams offering to sell us wonder drugs that will make our manhood magnificent.

Admittedly, eight of those were forwarded by Rabid’s wife, and the other two came from his girlfriend, but it isn’t the source that’s the issue here.

It’s the amount of time and money wasted on these pathetic pills that taste remarkably like vitamins. Rabid’s doctor says they are Placebos but we don’t see what difference it makes where they’re made.

Back to the problem of Internet porn, we noticed that the government claims Our Kim’s ideas are just plain silly, but they said the same thing about people who told them Alia was being run by Iraqi mother truckers, so we suspect there may be a spot of political rhetoric in their response.

Rabid’s only real objection to ISPs doing the filtering is that it will knock the socks off our own PC-based content-filtering solution, which is a major source of revenue, as any reseller would know.

Oh alright, that’s what it says on the business plan we showed the bank manager, but in reality Rabid knows only too well that punters get free filters and make us install them for the same price or less.

The response from the ISPs has been nothing short of predictable. They’d like to avoid doing anything except collecting their monthly debits and Rabid is obviously envious because our own ISP-venture was such a miserable failure. If we’d had to install content-filters we’d have crashed and burned even sooner than we did.

You can’t muck about with bandwidth without expecting some degradation of service and when you’re starting from a foundation built on recycled fibre-optic disco lamps there’s even less margin for error.

So we do shed a few tears for the struggling ISPs, every time our broker reminds us that we ignored his advice to invest in the OzEmail share market float.

That leaves us hoping that Coonan the Librarian succeeds in her push to promote personal filters being installed on every PC. Anything that makes parents think that their technology is inadequate helps us to sell them what their children have been bleating about for ages – a brand new drive-away-no-more-to-pay model.

Although we stole that marketing campaign from the automobile industry, we’re finding that customers readily understand the concept, and these days you need every tiny advantage to clinch the sale. Admittedly, a few of them get a tad uppity when we explain that the reason there’s no more to pay is that we took their hard drive away, but there’s no pleasing everyone.

Gotta go! Customers waiting!