ACMA takes action against eleven telcos

Electronics & Technology
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ACMA waving a little twig at telcos

I wonder when the big stick will come out to defend consumers??

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Appalling! The worst of the worst actions and all they get is a warning!

M2 Commander 
 was issued with a formal warning for transferring a consumer’s service from another telco without their consent.

ACMA may be operating with a mandate to make the ACCC look like a real go getter! I wonder what it would take for a penalty to be issued?

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It reminds me of an episode of the US comedy “Chicken Man” that used to be broadcast on the radio around 1970 when he walks around totally oblivious or avoiding the crime unfolding all around him until he finally spots his mother’s car parked at an expired meter and promptly writes a ticket for her.

Or the start of each episode of the Aussie TV comedy series, “Bad Cop. Bad Cop” where Michael Caton and Dan Whyllie walk back to their cop car eating burgers whilst totally oblivious of all the crime surrounding them until they see someone leaning against the front of their vehicle.

They immediately flash their badges and say “Get off the car, d***head.” “Yeah, We’re police officers”.

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The ACMA may be a Commonwealth government body, but its authority members are an interesting mix. Regulatory capture?

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ACMA is dated from 2005. Rather than capture might it be more properly ‘ownership by design’? Staffing ‘management’ is not an unusual method of circumventing doing the right thing for a community, just behind budgetary control to throttle any agency that gets ‘out of hand’ as government sees it.

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Keeping things in perspective:

In separate investigations, ten telcos were found to have breached the TCP Code by failing to lodge annual compliance statements with independent monitoring group Communications Compliance

That isn’t about defending consumers as such. It’s largely nuisance paperwork that is designed to trip companies up, particularly small ones - which can have the effect of making things worse for consumers by entrenching a duopoly or oligopoly i.e. limiting Choice.

If anyone has any allegations that any of those ten telcos has done the wrong thing then they should take that allegation to ACMA and by all means ACMA via the courts should apply proportionate punishment. Otherwise very little to see here - and it is not expressing things clearly to combine the “one telco” with the “ten telcos” to make “eleven telcos”, as ACMA has done.

Maybe this is a bit of showboating from ACMA.

Anyone know what is in one of these “compliance statements”? Are they made public?

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They are described on the Communications Compliance Ltd website, which also states when Carriage Service Providers might be referred to the ACMA.

It does not appear that the statements are publicly available, but the list of entities that have submitted them is - and it is lengthy.

As someone who has never been notified by the ATO that I can take my time, don’t worry about its deadlines when submitting my tax return, I have little sympathy for these eleven CSPs.

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OT but relevant - a double standard. You may never have lodged a FOI request then. Government is quite clear how difficult it is to get data, any data at all. Would and could the government take itself to court!

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Thanks for following that up. It does rather lack detail though. I suppose I would have to read the TCP Code, and that’s not something that I want to spend the time on.

That does confirm my viewpoint that this is largely designed to trip companies up.

Failure to lodge the Compliance Attestation does not imply in any way that the company has failed in its obligations to customers.

Have you ever asked? :slight_smile:

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