Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) chairman Graeme Samuel today warned the telecommunications industry that it would face additional regulation and court action unless it stopped misleading and cheating consumers.
ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel (Credit: Suzanne Tindal/ZDNet.com.au)
"Today the ACCC is putting the telecommunications industry on notice: misleading and unfair contracts, inadequate disclosure and subscription scams are all in our sights," Samuel said, speaking at the Australian Telecommunications User Group conference today. "Standards must improve or risk increased scrutiny and action."
Samuel said that consumers were often being left out of pocket, frustrated and with services they didn't want as the result of misleading advertising, false information and difficult unsubscribe mechanisms.
"While the ACCC would not normally address issues at a general industry level, there seems to be a broad awareness developing that the telecommunications industry is not consumer-friendly," he said.
The industry received the most complaints of any sector, according to Samuel, with the top 10 complaint areas bearing the names of the top four communications providers, which sat at positions one, three, seven and nine.
"It's not something that the industry can be in any sense proud of," he said. "The risk is, if this continues, the industry's reputation with consumers may be irretrievably damaged."
Some of the problem products he mentioned in his speech included phone cards, mobile premium services, peak broadband speeds, standard form contracts and "unlimited" or "free" slogans in advertisements.
"There is a significant volume of content which it appears is intended to deceive and entrap and that is illegal," he said. "We are drawing a line in the sand. We are saying to the poor performers — and there are many of them — mend your ways."
He concluded with the hard line, including threatening court action and flaunting new penalties which will be made possible by changes in the Trades Practices Act, due to occur soon.
"Operators should consider themselves on notice. If you mislead or deceive, if you withhold important information, if you fail to adequately disclose exclusions or limitations or create a wrong impression in your advertisements, you risk breaching the Trade Practices Act and in the next couple of months you potentially risk penalties in excess of $1 million per offence," he warned
"We will use the full suite of tools available to us including court action to correct the careless and stop the shonks as we continue to attempt to protect the interests of Australian telecommunications users," he concluded.
Is there a prize for guessing correctly who is at the top of that list by a country mile? I bet it is not the ISPs I use. They are, generally speaking, fair, reasonable, trustworthy, reliable and provide a stable service for a fair price.