Senator Alston, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, announced plans to introduce a raft of regulations to combat the increasingly ubiquitous practice of Internet dumping, whereby Internet surfers are, almost always without their knowledge, disconnected from their ISPs and dialled onto a high-cost 190 phone call, which can cost up to AU$5.50 per minute. The practice is generally not revealed to the surfer until they receive their next phone bill, incorporating much higher charges than they expected.
The most controversial planned regulation is to bar a consumer's access to the premium-rate 190 services, where the total charges exceed a certain amount each month. Alston said he would direct the Australian Communications Authority (ACA) to determine how much the cap would be, and enforce telecommunications carriers to implement it. A spokesperson for the minister said that there would be conflict between service providers, who want a high cap, and consumer groups, who want a low cap.
An industry group of 190 service providers, the Telephone Service Provider Association of Australia (TELSPA), is against capping altogether. "The capping situation is something we believe strongly should not be entered into in terms of segregating one telephone number out of any other number range," TELSPA president Adam Rowbottom told ZDNet Australia .
Rowbottom pointed out that Telstra already has credit management policies in place, and a call centre that monitors information calls, and flags calls of AU$250 or more if it is unusual for a customer. He adds that customers can easily run up large bills on international 0011 numbers and mobile phones.
Telstra has also cautioned about possible ways around the proposed legislation.
"If there are controls on 190 numbers, it's quite possible providers will go to the 0011 numbers, and we have less control on those," Telstra spokesperson Stuart Gray told ZDNet Australia . "It becomes next to impossible to ban a range of international calls. We have to look at the possibility that we control one area, but it just pushes it into another area of which we have less control. Again, it comes back to the customer taking control of their phone."
The ACA, which will decide the level of the cap and enforce its implementation, is still waiting on a formal direction from the minister to begin reviewing the situation. "We are looking at the policy approach for the issue the minister has identified, but we have to wait for a formal direction," Paul Slocum, communications manager for the ACA told ZDNet Australia .
Perhaps a solution is to require a passcode be provided by the phone user before connection to 1900 numbers. The onus would then be on the phone company to have adequate controls in place to prevent unauthorised calls.
I suppose this could be extended to all phone calls (eg in the highlighted example given where the dumper used a 0011 number)