Proposed amendments to the Telecommunications Competition Notice Guidelines

Overview

The ACCC is consulting on proposed amendments to the Telecommunications Competition Notice Guidelines (the Guidelines).

The Guidelines document includes an overview of the competition notice regime as contained in Part XIB of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth). The Guidelines themselves set out the matters that the ACCC will consider when deciding whether to issue a competition notice and the appropriateness of the ACCC issuing competition notices as opposed to taking other action under the Act.

The ACCC is seeking to update the Guidelines in order to reflect the legislative changes that have been made to the competition notice regime since they were last updated in 2004.

The main proposed amendments to the Guidelines relate to:

• updating references to the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 from the Trade Practices Act 1974
• incorporating amendments from the Telecommunications Legislation (Competition and Consumer Safeguards) Act 2010, which extended the telecommunications market to include content services and removed the ACCC’s obligation to observe procedural fairness requirements when issuing a Part A competition notice.