Here we are in the home stretch into the silly season. Of course, you’re all joining us for our End of Year events, aren’t you!?!?

I’m left wondering which government department will issue a request for comment in the week before shutdown. I suspect the Privacy Legislation amendments will be waved through, meaning we can all look forward to seeing penalties up to 30% of annual turnover and the predictable quirks of legislation passed without fully considering all the feedback.

The team have been working hard to upgrade a few links and switches here and there, and I still have one or 2 external presentations to give before we wrap up for the year. I am very proud of all the work the IAA staff have done this year – that portal for starters is a breath of fresh air! We do appreciate it when members uncover things we hadn’t expected, so please do let us know if something doesn’t quite work the way you’d like.

Our Public Policy Advisory Panel met last month, and my goodness the topics were controversial: NBN SAU, Privacy changes, the consumer-data right, low-income measures, critical-infrastructure (risk) measures… Each of these triggered a passionate discussion, which means we are looking carefully at all of these topics. We’re definitely trying to track the new risk-management framework closely so that we can appraise our members of the best approach to new obligations when they inevitably appear!

Don’t forget the end-of-year embargo, and of course don’t forget to take some time off over the end of the year! After coming to our events, of course!

All the best

Narelle

Another fantastic AGM took place this month, it was a hybrid event so those near and far could join.  

After an Acknowledgement of Country, we had updates from Chair Matthew Enger, Deputy Chair Brett O’Hara and CEO Narelle Clark. Matthew extended a thank you to the Board and staff for all their hard work; Brett presented a snapshot of the audited financials; and Narelle Clark delivered an insightful and interesting walk through of the past year. 

The motion that Crunch Auditing be adopted as the IAA auditors for FY22-23 passed and Company Secretary Kitty Hibble, acting as the Returning Officer, announced the results of the 2022 election. Congratulations to Nathan Brookfield on your appointment to the IAA Board and Matthew Enger on your reappointment. 

We would like to thank all the members who voted in the election and attended the meeting – in person and online via Zoom. 

Here’s to another busy and effective year ahead!

This month’s Meet the Member segment features one of our exceptional Board members, Matthew Moyle-Croft, colloquially known as ‘MMC’. Matthew currently works at APJ Imperva Inc, managing the company’s infrastructure strategy for APAC, Africa and the Middle East. He first joined IAA in 2018 when he was approached to run for the IAA Board. Keen to contribute to the local Internet industry after many years living abroad, he joined as a professional member and was elected.  

Matthew’s journey in the industry started at the University of Adelaide, where he completed a Computer Science and Mathematics degree with honours. Towards the end of this degree he was asked to work for the university-owned Camtech, which had been formed to commercialise some of the things the department had been doing – including being a very early dialup ISP. He took the opportunity without a lot of thought other than ‘well, this looks kind of fun’.  

Over his 28-year career Matthew has done a lot of cool stuff – everything from building high speed networks on planes to having a tiny involvement with NASA JPL (now Perseverance). First up, Matthew was engaged in a bunch of interesting things that Camtech did aside from being an ISP (which it sold to Ozemail in 1998). There he did everything from consulting, training, selling Sun Microsystems and Fore Systems ATM network gear to the departments of Education and Defence, and getting into the very early credit card transactions on the Internet.  

Next, Matthew worked for a few years mainly doing Cisco Call Manager tasks for a network integrator that was eventually bought by IBM, before getting back into the Internet industry at Internode in 2005. There, Matthew built out their DSLAM network, helped bootstrap NodePhone, and was heavily involved in the international network and setting up peering across the globe. This led Matthew (just before Internode sold to iiNET) to move to AWS in Seattle where he spent six years running much of AWS’ global peering and acquisition of network capacity, as well as some of the new Cloud regional development. Following that, Matthew returned to Australia in 2018 and was employed by Oracle to perform similar work until he moved to Imperva in 2021.  

Today, Matthew says he is lucky enough to live in Adelaide again and enjoy South Australia’s wine regions – he doesn’t mind a good drop! He has been married for almost 20 years and has two teenagers, one of whom is likely to follow his footsteps into a career in ‘IT’, just like Matthew followed his dad’s. 

We proudly sponsored NetThing 2022 this year, which took place online with a program full of fantastic sessions and keynote speakers. Our panel discussion: Defamation for Internet Service Providers and Other Internet Intermediaries, moderated by Sophia Joo, was 45 minutes of engaging discussion that sought to unpack the long-debated question of how to balance the responsibilities placed on different sections of the Internet industry to appropriately protect individual end-users, while also ensuring the smooth running of the Internet. Our panel included Daniel Joyce (UNSW), John Morris (Internet Society), Sunita Bose (DiGI) and Christiane Gillespie-Jones (Communications Alliance), each sharing their perspective on questions posed by Sophia, with some incredibly insightful responses leaving us with much food for thought!  

If you missed out, head over to the NetThing YouTube channel – happy viewing!  

Since we were fortunate enough to have almost the entire Board present at the events, we thought we would slot in a Board Strategy Workshop where we could bring together all the great ideas of the Board and staff, and start making plans for the next year and beyond.  

The day started with a Board meeting that saw Matthew Enger re-appointed as Chair and Brett O’Hara re-appointed as Deputy Chair – congratulations, fellas; we are very appreciative of your hard work. It then continued into very fruitful discussions about much of what we do.  Watch this space, members; there is much to look forward to!