Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for that kind introduction.
I acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today. I pay my respects to elders past and present and extend that respect to any First Nations people joining us today.
The ACMA’s vision is for a connected, informed and entertained Australia.
As General Manager of the Consumer Division, my focus is on how the telecommunications sector is delivering on that vision from the consumer’s perspective.
Our work is directed towards ensuring consumers are treated fairly, as well as towards building consumer trust in the services the telecommunications industry delivers – particularly, but not exclusively, for individual and small business consumers.
We do this by:
- monitoring how consumer expectations are evolving, including through feedback received at our Consumer Consultative Forum
- assessing whether market responses and regulation are achieving reasonable outcomes against those expectations for consumers
- where we have the power, we update regulation to address gaps the market has not fixed of its own accord
- and finally, where telco practices fall short of minimum legal obligations directed towards those consumer outcomes, we hold telcos to account through our compliance and enforcement work.
We all know that we are working in an environment that looks very different from the one we knew at the end of the last century.
I am old enough to remember when the one household telephone in the family dining room was our only real means of communication beyond actually being in the same place as other people and talking to them face-to-face.
Enough time has passed that I can warmly recall my monthly summons to explain to my Dad why I needed to make so many STD calls to friends during the month. In those days, as some of you will remember, STD calls cost a lot more than today!
Many decades later, access to phone, messaging and internet services is fundamental. It enables Australians to participate in the economy and their communities, access essential services and, importantly, seek help in an emergency. It also affects how we protect our personal information and manage our exposure to scams and other criminal activity.
Increasingly, a phone number is as much a part of an individual’s identity as their name, address or fingerprint.
These days, I recall those monthly summonses fondly when contrasted to my contemporary experience of spending what seems an inordinate amount of time resetting passwords, finding passkeys and dealing with multifactor authentication simply to support maintaining safe and reliable access to basic services and being able to participate effectively in modern life.
The market itself is also much more complex than 30 years ago, with low barriers to entry and more businesses than ever involved in delivering what can and should appear to the consumer to be a simple service.
Technical innovation has created immense opportunity for connection, productivity, efficiency and growth. It has also created risks that must be anticipated and managed.
What, however, has not changed is the basics of consumer expectations.
Consumers expect to get what they pay for, and this includes a reliable, dependable service.
They expect to be treated fairly and reasonably.
And, when something goes wrong, they expect whatever the problem is to be addressed promptly.
Monitoring what needs to be done by the market to meet those essential consumer expectations matters.
But we are very attuned to the fact that what contribution towards that end needs to be delivered looks very different for different telcos within that market.
How well telcos individually, and collectively, deliver on those expectations is central to building trust in communications services. And, of course, it can be done voluntarily by industry stepping up and working together, or by the imposition and enforcement of new rules.
As we look back to the recent past, the initial rollout of the NBN was not matched by a positive consumer experience during the migration. That ultimately led, among other things, to a new Telecommunications Complaints Handling Standard.
Around the same time, the ACMA became concerned about the treatment of consumers experiencing financial hardship.
There were numerous concerns but these included whether all consumers who should have been benefitting from the protections then in the TCP Code were benefitting from them. There was also concern about whether arrangements put in place to assist customers experiencing hardship, for example, payment plans, were really being designed to assist customers and keep them connected.
In 2019, we began publishing our annual State of Play reports to share our understanding of what telcos were doing to support customers, and we continued this reporting to share trends for several years.
In 2022, we issued a statement of expectations around the support needed for telco consumers experiencing vulnerability, given concerns about their treatment.
In 2023, we published our What consumers want paper, aligned with the commencement of the TCP Code review. In it, we set out in detail our views on the gap between what the market was delivering and reasonable consumer expectations in a contemporary environment.
Then, when the industry did not step up, we made the Telecommunications Financial Hardship Standard.
Across this time, we had flagged ongoing issues with the treatment of, and quality of services provided to consumers experiencing domestic and family violence.
And while we recognise that telcos themselves are not the perpetrators of that violence, they are responsible for access to the very services that are essential to escaping that violence.
We also recognise that how well that access is provided, and how the engagement between the victim-survivor and the telco occurs, can contribute to either protecting them from abuse or aggravating the effect of it.
As problems continued for that group of consumers, we then made the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Standard.
And now, we are consulting on a new TCP Standard to replace the longstanding co-regulatory code.
Alongside this, and most acutely over the past two to three years, we have seen failures in the delivery of the emergency call service. Understandably, such failures have received widespread media coverage and attracted significant public scrutiny.
Too often, there has been little evidence that telcos are learning from their failures or the failures of others, nor that they are proactively improving their own systems, processes and practices with a view to improving consumer outcomes.
But, and this is important, it would be a mistake to think responsibility rests only with the telco that holds the end-customer contract.
Certainly, the telco with the retail relationship with the customer has primary responsibility for the quality of service in the direct engagement with the customer.
But as for the issues which arise with the quality of the underlying voice, text or data services that a customer has bought; that is a different story.
Many years on from making the complaints handling Standard, we still regularly hear of customers being referred back and forth between one telco and another involved in the supply of their service.
Our compliance, investigation and enforcement work increasingly throws up arguments that whatever went wrong was the responsibility of a different telco in the supply chain – a telco who isn’t taking responsibility and sometimes one who cannot be held to account for their responsibilities in delivering adequate outcomes for the consumer.
To that end, we are now taking a much sharper look at what incentives, regulation or action is needed to make sure all telcos that are collectively involved in delivering services for consumers can be held to account for their role in doing so.
Every telco in the supply chain that facilitates a call, text or access to data has a role in ensuring consumers receive what they bought, and, in many cases, what they need to participate safely in modern life.
Nowhere has the need for this focus come more to the fore than in our collective efforts to stop scams.
There have been significant efforts and real successes in this space.
Since December 2020, more than 3.3 billion scam calls and, since July 2022 more than 1.1 billion scam texts have been stopped from reaching consumers’ devices. That is a substantial achievement.
But sophisticated criminal enterprises will continue to find any vulnerability they can exploit – anywhere from the point at which a contract is entered into to enable calls or texts to be initiated, through every stage of the supply chain that is involved in a call or message reaching an unwitting consumer.
The vulnerability may not sit with the telco with the direct customer relationship. Yet it is often that telco’s reputation and business that are exposed when a scam reaches the consumer.
As we apply the lessons learned from enforcing the Reducing Scam Calls and Scam SMS Industry Code, and particularly as we move towards implementation of the government’s Scams Prevention Framework, our focus is clear – for real consumer outcomes to be achieved, enforceable obligations must apply to every telco in the supply chain.
Those obligations must ensure that each telco does the right thing – the right thing not only for the end user, irrespective of whether that telco has a direct relationship with that person or business, but also the right thing by every other telco involved in delivering that service.
However, as is often the case, that is easier said than done.
Our experience enforcing the industry code, and more recently the rules relating to the new SMS Sender ID Register, has exposed several problems.
Some telcos have restricted understanding of how traffic passes through and across their networks and signal paths.
Many have limited knowledge of the supply chains in which they participate, especially beyond the immediate adjacent telcos.
And, having heeded the calls for regulation which distinguishes between the respective roles of originating, transit and terminating telcos in the supply chains, we now find telcos themselves can be unable to accurately identify which hat they were wearing in relation to a particular scam.
That ignorance undermines the integrity of the system and most certainly doesn’t contribute to building either a stronger system, nor is it likely to generate trust in consumers.
These deficiencies delay efforts to stop scams, make vulnerabilities harder to identify and, where scams do get through, it impedes action being taken against the telco that has let down both consumers and other telcos in the chain.
This experience is most certainly informing our approach to the development of the telco code under the Scam Prevention Framework, as we look to embed Know Your Customer, Know Your Traffic framework in the new rules.
But I mention scams prevention only as one manifestation of the broader problem we are turning our minds to.
Consumers are being let down every day because not every telco in the telecommunications supply chain is focussed on how its decisions and actions contribute to the service received by the end user.
Every telco must consider whether it is helping to meet consumer expectations – and what it needs to do to help rebuild trust in a market where trust is at a historical low point.
The retail provider may be the public face of a failure.
But responsibility, and accountability, also sit with businesses along the supply chain, including those who might be many steps removed from the retail customer relationship.
The ACMA is considering these issues carefully as we calibrate obligations in the draft TCP Standard. Along with consumer law which the ACCC administers, the TCP Standard sits at the heart of the telecommunications protection regime in Australia, regulating the minimum standards every consumer should expect from the telco market.
We are also concerned about how these issues of respective responsibilities across supply chains are arising as technology transitions affect consumers: whether through fibre upgrade programs, the retirement of legacy technologies, the introduction of new services, as well as in the growing role satellite technologies are playing in delivering connectivity for Australians.
We are particularly focused on what these developments mean for people who live, work or access services in parts of Australia where competition does not provide the same choice and protections it can offer in urban markets.
Feedback on these issues is certainly coming through from our Consumer Consultative Forums, as you can see in the Communiques we now publish after each meeting.
These supply chain issues also arise as we consider the use of artificial intelligence, and in whether that use ultimately improves or diminishes the end consumer’s experience.
Addressing this will require every telco to make considered decisions about what forms of AI they use and how they use them, and then actively monitor use and effectiveness.
The ACMA is a statutory regulator and we must operate within the Telecommunications Act, which as you know calls for the greatest practicable use of industry self-regulation. We respect the intention of the Parliament and reflect that in our approach.
One way we support the self-regulatory framework is by being clear with the market about where we consider practices have not kept pace with reasonable consumer expectations – or where they appear unlikely to do so as those expectations evolve.
Unfortunately, recent history shows that these signals have not consistently produced a systematic industry response. Too often, the industry has either chosen not to act or has been unable to act, leaving the ACMA to step in.
So my call to you today is simple.
Take stock of your contribution to consumer outcomes.
Look beyond your contractual boundary and your immediate customer.
Understand the supply chains you participate in.
Identify the risks your decisions create for end-consumers and for other providers and proactively manage them.
And act early to fix problems and lift standards.
Do not wait to be forced by the ACMA to change.
If every telco takes ownership of its contribution, this industry can rebuild trust, strengthen the resilience of essential services and deliver the outcomes Australian consumers reasonably expect and deserve.
Thank you for listening – and thank you to CommsDay for the opportunity to speak with you today.