The Commerce Commission's High Court loss to Telecom last week over its 1999 introduction of  the 0867 dialing scheme brought back memories of my own case against the corporation - which took somewhat less than eight years (eight years!) to resolve.

To be fair, my case was somewhat simpler. When Telecom took over the old Post Office telephone network in 1990, they made three promises, the first of which read: "Local free calling will remain available to all residential customers." A television advertisement at the time had that chiselled in stone and concluded with the words, "A promise is a promise". So when, in March 2000, they charged me $29.70 for dialing my local ISP on the same local number I'd been using for years, I filed a claim with the Disputes Tribunal.


Telecom TV ad, circa 1990



A Little Background
It was all about the internet, of course, and how badly Telecom were prepared for its sudden uptake.

In 1996 they signed an interconnect agreement with then main rival, Clear. That agreement included  call termination charges, meaning that the terminating network would pay 2 cents per minute to the network originating the call. Telecom had zillions of customers, Clear had a handful, so it wasn't hard to see which way the money would flow.

Then someone at Clear had a brainwave: sign up ISPs. Forget voice calls lasting  minutes. People spent hours online. That meant calls from Telecom customers to Clear-based ISPs would become a goldmine for the upstart network.

And indeed they did. At its peak it was estimated that Telecom was forking out between twelve and twenty million dollars a year to its rival.

So Telecom changed the rules. Because internet traffic was endangering the 111 emergency network -- a lie, the two networks are actually functionally separate -- it would have to have its own prefix: 0867. Users had two months to make the change or they'd be charged -- quite coincidentally -- 2 cents a minute.

I refused. Actrix, my ISP at the time, still had a local number and were ten minutes walk from my front door. Why should I use 0867 for a local call when Telecom had promised they'd stay free forever? Hence my Disputes Tribunal case.



To Court (Almost)
I wrote about my claim in the April 2000 print edition of this magazine, and shortly after that things went a little crazy. The story made national news, I was the subject of a 60 Minutes documentary, and received hundreds of letters and emails, all supporting my claim.

Then Telecom refunded my money.

They explained that they understood my confusion and would let me off this time with a warning. (And without a bill, of course, they had no case to answer.)

So when the next month's phone bill came in, I did it all again!



A Dangerous Precedent
It's probably worth noting here why Telecom were so scared of the Disputes Tribunal. The previous year a disgruntled phone card user had taken them to court after they'd unilaterally invalidated his old phone card. The corporation lost and, as a result of the precedent set, had to refund not just the plaintiff's card but tens of thousands of others.

My second claim was set down for Tuesday, 16 May 2000. A few hours before the hearing, I received a call from Telecom's legal counsel to say the charges would be refunded so again there'd be no case to answer.

The call wasn't unexpected. A couple of days earlier - and just hours before my 60 Minutes segment was due to screen - Telecom and Clear kissed and made up. They announced they'd come to an agreement: that Telecom would scrap the so-called "internet tax" and that Clear would encourage users to use 0867 numbers.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Immediately afterwards, Telecom repented of its evil corporate ways and set about providing the country with the most modern, cost-effective, high-speed broadband network on the planet. New Zealand's knowledge economy boomed, ex-pats flocked back as internet businesses relocated here, and Theresa Gattung was made a saint...

Sorry, I think I got a little delusional back there.