IAA Newsletters
Another virtual AGM this year kicked off with Matthew Enger’s Acknowledgement of Country. The Chair, David Hooton, officially opened the meeting just after 5pm AEDT acknowledging the previous AGM minutes, thanking the staff and the Board for all their hard work and extending a special thanks to Matthew McDonough and Washif Ahmed for their service to the Association.
Deputy Chair, Matthew Enger, provided a quick report of the audited financials and the motion that Crunch Auditing be adopted as the IAA auditors for FY 21-22 passed.
CEO, Narelle Clark, provided an update from the operational staff that looked back over the past year. The report was a testament to what a busy year it has been, providing insights drawn from our IX statistics and finishing off with thoughts for the future.
Returning Officer, Kitty Hibble, announced the nominees and election results for the Board Election, with both Daryl Collins and Richard Thompson being elected for three-year terms and Nate Garr a one-year term.
If you would like to view any of the documents contained in our AGM pack, including our beautiful Annual Report, please head over to our website.
We would like to thank all the members who voted in the election and attended the meeting. We hope to see you at the next AGM, who knows, and it may even be in person!
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We would like to remind members that our network change embargo period is from 22nd December 2021 through to 10th January 2022 inclusive. During this time, we will not be provisioning any new services or changing any existing services. Rest assured, support staff will be on call to deal with urgent issues or network emergencies should they arise.
If you have any orders or change requests, please submit them by 10th December 2021.
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It was with much sadness that our team farewelled Washif Ahmed, who joined Ausgrid as a Network Engineer. Washif joined us in 2019 and has been an asset to our technical team right from the outset. His caring and kind nature, fantastic work ethic, knowledge, skills and abilities and funny memes will be greatly missed. We wish him all the best with his future career.
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Privacy Act Review | Attorney General’s Department | 10 January 2021
The AGD is consulting on proposals for reform and questions on the Privacy Act 1988 Discussion Paper. This will focus on aspects including on the scope and application of the Privacy Act, whether a statutory tort should be introduced for privacy invasions, the effectiveness of enforcement powers and mechanisms under the Privacy Act and the feasibility of an independent certification scheme to monitor compliance.
Superfast Broadband Access Service Access (SBAS) Determination Inquiry Discussion Paper | ACCC | 10 December 2021
The ACCC is in the process of confirming a final access determination for SBAS, following which a provider needs to ensure access to a declared service on the request of an access seeker. The inquiry will consult on price and non-price terms and conditions of access to the service, whether the Regional Broadband Levy should be absorbed by SBAS providers or passed onto RSPs and users and whether network providers should disclose network service quality and reliability indicators to RSPs. It also inquires about exemptions from the access determination applying to small scale operators (with less than 12,000 end users) and competition-based exemptions.
Consumer Data Right – Telecommunications Draft Designation Instrument | Treasury | 13 December 2021
The Treasury is seeking feedback on the Draft Designation, which outlines the datasets and data holders to be covered by the CDR.
Telecommunications Service Provider (Customer Identity Verification) (CIV) Determination 2021 | ACMA | 15 December
The CIV Determination imposes carriage service providers (CSPs) to introduce two-factor authentication for all customer interactions at high-risk of fraud. Although Communications Alliance released a Code covering similar ground earlier, this Determination is more specific on definitions (of high-risk interaction) and the process for identity verification. It also requires CSPs to collect information to show their compliance.
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NBN SIO Record Keeping Rules | ACCC
IAA responded to the ACCC’s Proposed Changes to the NBN Services in Operation Record Keeping and Reporting Rules (NBN SIO RKR) Consultation Paper. We conveyed our support for the publishing of high-level CVC overage and utilisation data, but opposed the publication of data disaggregated by access seekers as this should be considered confidential information. We also supported reporting metrics include NBN Co performance against service levels and performance objectives.
Basic Online Safety Expectations (BOSE) | Department of Communications
In collaboration with 10 associations, IAA made a submission to the Basic Online Safety Expectations. Here, we raised our concerns about the extensive and vague nature of the scope of services discussed, which in its current form could incorporate website, app or communication services accessible to Australian users. We also raised the potential impact BOSE could have on over-cautious censorship and surveillance.
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Policy News
The Critical Infrastructure Bill 2020 passed both House of Representatives and the Senate last week. The legislation expands the number of sectors classified as critical infrastructure, including the communications and data storage and processing sector. It also enforces mandatory reporting requirements and provides Home Affairs with the ability to issue information gathering, intervention and action direction requests.
In August, IAA responded to the Treasury’s Consumer Data Rights (CDR) Sectoral Assessment for telecommunications, where we argued the CDR could add to existing compliance requirements for ISPs and inhibit competition within the sector. Last week, the Treasury released their Sectoral Assessment wherein they recommend the telco sector be designated for the CDR. Now, the Treasury is finalising the classes of information and who is required to share it as a data holder to be covered by the CDR. They have recommended that carriers and CSPs be designated as data holders who should provide access to generic and publicly available product data, product data that relates to particular products used by consumers and basic consumers and account data.
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Well, here we are on the cusp of December 2021, meaning it’s almost 2022. What a year! A huge thank you goes to all our members and stakeholders for supporting our work this year. In case you missed our AGM this month, we launched our new website, the technical team have strengthened our intercapital connectivity, completed numerous upgrades, and started rolling out the new out of band network. Our admin team have been amazingly efficient making sure all of our member data is perfect while we get ready to migrate to our new portal, and our advocacy work has hit amazing highs contributing to the debate on regulation. On top of all that, we also successfully ran the AGM under our new constitution as a company limited by guarantee. What an amazing effort by the team! They’re even madly trying to get some end of year events for you to attend, but as we now hit the Omicron letter of the Greek alphabet, our events list will sadly have to remain short. Hopefully some of you will get to a cruise or pub night out with fellow IAA members. Perhaps some of you might even get to our new office in North Sydney that we are visiting again regularly!
Of course, as we move into the silly season, the various pieces of legislation the government hadn’t had passed are creeping out – just this last week we’ve seen yet another attempt to legislate trolls out of existence, and earlier this month we saw ACMA introduce a parallel customer identification system (on top of the new Comms Alliance Code) and the cut down Critical Infrastructure bill was passed, meaning we will all have new mandatory reporting in the new year. Treasury have also decided they want to be our next big regulator, and will be requiring us to meet Consumer Data Right obligations, and to apply it to everything that attaches to a ‘carriage service’ – you guessed it, that means anything that goes on and with a network service, from phones to IoT widgets. It all keeps us on our toes advocating for reasonable, lighter touch regulation that enables good service, not heavy-handed obligations that merely add to dataveillance and make business harder.
We also ran a roundtable at NetThing on the topic of Internet as an Essential Service last month – while many people see this as indisputable, regulating it as such has a whole different meaning and would require a long list of obligations on service providers that might not necessarily get what users need. Have a watch of the session on our website. We had some great contributors to the discussion with perspectives from all over.
Next year also looks like it will be exciting for us as well. Hopefully all the new pieces of kit we’re ordering will arrive in a timely fashion, so we can activate capacity well in advance of it being needed. Once again, we’re all just wishing for the pandemic to go away so that supply chains can get back to some sort of normal.
Finally, I have to say that I have a new boss – Matthew Enger has stepped up as the new Chair of the Association, with Brett O’Hara acting as Deputy Chair. I have no doubt Matt will be excellent, and he has been just brilliant in providing his time as a Director, past Secretary and Deputy Chair. David Hooton, outgoing Chair, will certainly be very much missed, and I am very glad to see him stay on the board. David has contributed so much with his industry and technology know how, and has been a fantastic guide for me and the team. He has been tireless in his time and effort for the Association, and we are immensely grateful. THANK YOU DAVID! Thanks also to Field Solutions for your support.
Hope to see you all soon, and do have a safe holiday season!
Narelle Clark, IAA CEO
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There’s nothing like setting the dates for the end of year change freeze (22 Dec – 10 Jan) to make you sit up and notice the year is almost over! At least most of us are out of lockdown in time to do some seasonal shopping. On our shopping list is a brand new out of band network, and a few extra switches to accommodate all the member growth we keep seeing! The big Facebook outage recently demonstrated just how important your out of band access is when the network is broken, and that out of band access is vital for ensuring you can get access to sort whatever problem the network or our own humanity causes. Our existing out of band network is old and barely serviceable, so it’s definitely time for a replacement.
Speaking of replacements, we are currently advertising for a new Policy Officer and Network Engineer, both of whom are off to new roles. If you know of anyone that might be suitable, drop us a line – they need to be totally fluent in internet acronym-speak, albeit somewhat different ones for each role, and be truly dedicated to serving our industry and making the Internet better.
We’ll also be recruiting soon for an Advisory Council. The council will comprise members/member representatives and is to assist us in forming our positions on the various regulatory and policy issues and will meet about four times per year to give us that guidance. We’d love to hear from your policy nerds or even business people that have an interest in sensible rules within our industry. If we can pick the brains of a few of you, our submissions and representation will be even better!
A huge congratulations to the team and to NZIX with the launch of WLG-IX. With two initial points of presence, this is a great expansion to the existing services across New Zealand. The POPs are in Xtreme and Spark’s Featherstone sites so nicely accessible to many of the Wellington service infrastructure.
You may have noticed that auDA has finally launched the timetable for direct registrations in the .au namespace. This means you will be able to register your own domain names as a second level domain directly under .au. If you already have some_example.com.au then you will have priority in getting some_example.au as long as no-one else has some_example.org.au etc. Most countries have direct registrations already and it didn’t break their internet when it was introduced, but members should be aware that this change is coming, and it might mean extra effort in your DNS or customer support. Or you might want to try a whole new marketing approach with your shiny new short url. Check the auDA website for the full rules and the timetable.
Last but not least, I must extend my thanks to member Ciphertel for stepping into the breach when we couldn’t get to QV1 for the power outage this month. It is brilliant to see the value our members bring. I just hope the coffee in the new café is good enough to justify the hassle.
As ever – please feel free to get in touch to give me your views on any of the topics in this month’s newsletter.
Narelle Clark
