Conroy jumps out of filter fire into iiNet ire

By Stan Beer
Thursday, 02 April 2009 18:50

Opinion and Analysis

Senator Stephen Conroy's watch as Communications Minister seems to be going from bad to worse after publicly making comments that could land him legal hot water. The comments at a public telecoms conference about a high profile court case involving ISP iiNet have been deemed by a number of sources as inappropriate, defamatory and potentially prejudicial to the case.

iiNet, Australia's third largest ISP, is doing battle in the Federal Court of NSW with a consortium of movie studios and a TV network that have accused it of allowing its network to be used to illegally download copyright entertainment. The ISP also happens to be one of Senator Conroy's biggest critics and recently pulled out of his office's much maligned Internet filter trial.

The public slanging between the Communications Minister and iiNet is hard to find a precedent for in the ICT industry. The CEO of iiNet, Michael Malone, has told iTWire and a number of other media sources quite openly that he believes Senator Conroy is the worst Communications Minister ever and described him as incompetent.

Malone also told iTWire last year that iiNet would participate in the then upcoming filter trial just to show the world how easy it would be to break. "A 16 year old could crack it in five minutes," he said.

With this in mind, Senator Conroy appears to have taken the opportunity to exact verbal retribution against iiNet at the CommsDay Summit 2009 held in Sydney this week. With Senator Conroy expected to address the conference about progress in the upcoming National Broadband Network (NBN), the audience was packed with many the telecoms industry's leading lights.

Senator Conroy, however, stunned the bemused audience by making sarcastic and denigrating remarks about the iiNet defence strategy for its court case.

He described iiNet's claim that it didn't know what material its customers were downloading as "stunning" and he likened iiNet's defence strategy to a "Yes Minister episode".

Both remarks made by a Federal Government Minister about an ongoing court case have raised the ire of not only iiNet but members of the legal community as well as the opposition.

It has been suggested that iiNet could have a case for pursuing Senator Conroy for defamation but even worse for the Minister there is a possibility his remarks could be deemed as contempt of court.

Whatever the outcome, Senator Conroy has put himself and the Government on the backfoot because of this incident. Calls from the Federal Opposition and telecoms industry leaders are likely to grow louder.

With Telstra out of the NBN race, growing criticism of the Government's handling of the tender process, controversy over leaked website blacklists, and the Minister seeming to be slowly backing away from the Internet filter program, Senator Conroy seems to be digging an ever deeper hole for himself. The Government may well find that it will have to move the most controversial Communications Minister in living memory into a less controversial portfolio.

This story was written at a late hour so we did not attempt to contact the Minister's office for comment.