The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has won its court case against Australia’s biggest telecommunication company, Telstra. The case has run for over a year-and-a-half and ended when a federal court fined the telcon A$18.6m (US$16.5m) for…
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has won its court case against Australia’s biggest telecommunication company, Telstra. The case has run for over a year-and-a-half and ended when a federal court fined the telcon A$18.6m (US$16.5m) for blocking its competitors access to the telecommunications infrastructure.
The ACCC was initially pursuing Telstra for A$34m (US$30.3m) whereas Telstra suggested it could pay A$2-3m (US$1.8-2.7m). Although the judge in the case, Justice Middleton, said that there was no implicit conspiracy by Telstra’s senior executives to block competitors, the court ruled that Telstra took no steps to develop a culture of compliance with its access obligations under the Trade Practices Act and the Telecommunications Act and had contravened its licence on 27 occasions between July 2006 and April 2008, reported The Australian.
The crux of the case revolved around Telstra’s refusal to allow its wholesale competitors, Optus and iiNet access to install their own broadband equipment in seven lucrative metropolitan telephony exchanges.
In election year in Australia, telecommunications has become a political hot potato. The National Broadband Network is spreading itself across the country. Under the Labour plans for the NBN, Telstra will effectively sell off the existing network to the NBN, removing its role in determining exchange access and competing with other ISPs to purchase NBN access at wholesale rates. However, Liberal policy is to ditch the NBN altogether and retain the role of the ACCC in determining access disputes to the existing copper network.
