I'm surprised no one else pointed out, but this coincides directly with the timing of their paywalls. The paywalls on Murdoch's sites went up early 2013. TFA says that it's primarily a drop in advertising revenue, so is this proof that paywalls result in a loss of money, due to a loss of advertising incoming. I know personally I have stopped visiting the Courier Mail website due to the paywall.

The Oceanic servers in at least WoW are still located in the US. They're just labelled Oceanic for the players to use from that region.

At the moment, with the discount, it's approximately 65$ per year for xbox live gold. Without the discount it's 80-90$. With this increase, if it goes through directly will push it to 100$+. That's getting to be a bit too expensive. Furthermore, Australians don't get all the premium services that America gets, we don't have netflix, or anything like that. We have a download movie service which offers few movies, for far too much. Ultimately this is starting to make xbox live gold account not look worth it to me, and making the PS3 more appealing. I could understand the increase if there were services costing them money, but from a standpoint outside of America it just seems like more money grabbing.

Back in 07 when Australia was deciding between our two primary parties, the current government (Labor) used a policy of an opt-in filter system. This system was going to replace the method used by the old government, which didn't work at all (computer-side filters) because people could bypass them fairly easily. Not as easily as this though. Moving on about 1 yeah from when they were elected in, their policy suddenly changed. No longer was it an opt-in system, it was now compulsory for -everyone- to be filtered. And there would be a secondary opt-in filter that would block all porn. From that, they've continued on their censoring rampage. Unfortunately, the current government doesn't seem to listen to its people at all. And a lot of Australians are ignorant and blind. As long as someone says "it's to block child porn" they agree with it. When explained properly, almost everyone says it's stupid. Our government is up for election again soon, I can only hope that people will wake up and see what's happening... But I'm not holding my breath. Both governments are terrible.