Cornered! is a blog devoted, most of the time anyway, to telecommunications: local and global issues, technology, people and trends from the perspective of someone who's been reporting, analysing and commenting on the industry since the dark ages (BC - before competition). Sometimes serious, sometimes flippant, sometimes frivolous. Controversial, analytical, informative, amusing, but never boring; a vehicle for examinations of important issues and observations on my encounters and experiences in an industry where polarised views and hyperbole are the norm.
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Cornered! Structural separation: on the cards or not?
Cornered! Structural separation: on the cards or not? | Structural separation: on the cards or not? |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Thursday, 04 June 2009 | |
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To support his claim that Labor is not in favour of structural separation Minchin provide an extract from the Senate Estimates Hansard in which he grilled Conroy on the question and where Conroy said that this was option was not canvassed in the regulatory reform discussion paper, adding: "I have certainly never advocated structural separation." The regulatory discussion paper was certainly seized on as by many in the industry as canvassing structural separation of Telstra. This may have been wishful thinking on their part but Minchin's, and Conroy's comments prompted me to revisit the paper and see exactly what it 'canvasses'. Certainly there was nothing in the paper in favour of maintaining the status quo - operational separation of Telstra - and trying to solve the problems purely with revised regulation. "A dominant theme arising from the regulatory submissions [to the first NBN plan] was that the accounting and operational separation regimes have not promoted genuine equivalence of access for access seekers in the Australian telecommunications industry," it said. "In practice, despite extensive monitoring and reporting requirements on Telstra, it is extremely difficult to verify that this approach delivers genuine equivalence.... Maintaining the current separation arrangements will not deal with the issues concerning Telstra's use of its vertical integration." The paper then goes on to say: "In light of this, there are a number of options the Government is considering. Figure 2 shows a number of possible separation models in order of increasing strength of the equivalence arrangements," and sure enough at the top of the pile in figure 2 is full structural separation and underneath it legal separation, which the paper explains "refers to the situation where appropriate parts of the company are made into separate legal entities, but ownership by the same owner is still allowed."
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