THE broadband battle between Telstra and its rivals has been murky from day one, with mud flung from all sides.
The Wikipedia website has even been used to publish a character assassination of
Telstra chief executive Sol Trujillo. Incorrect statements about Sol and his career have been removed from the site, but only after Sol's US lawyers threatened legal action.
The identity of the person posting the statements about Sol remains a mystery, although there is a suggestion the content was put online using a Telstra-connected mobile phone.
News of Sol's legal bid to remove the material emerged after The Age tracked down a legal letter from Sol's New York-based briefs, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, to the Wikimedia Foundation of San Francisco.
The letter has been posted on www.chillingeffects.org.
In the March 7 letter, the lawyers request that language related to Solomon Trujillo be "permanently be removed" from the Wikipedia site, and that an anonymous user be blocked from editing the page.
"This false and defamatory assertion has been repeatedly removed, but the anonymous user keeps replacing the false and defamatory language," wrote the lawyers.
The letter stated that if Wikimedia did not comply with the requests by 7pm on March 7, legal action would start on March 10.
The threat of legal action worked. A sanitised biography of Sol is now available, minus claims of impropriety related to his time at Qwest and Graviton in the US.
Indeed, such was the bias of the old bio that Wikipedia editors took issue with the content.
"This section seems to be a sounding board for those who have an axe to grind with Sol," wrote one editor. "We should be extra careful to stay to the facts and not hint at anything else."
While Sol was fighting online attacks, others at Telstra had a political beef to deal with after an odd shift in topic at the Senate Standing Committee on Economics and Budget Estimates.
Labor senator Kate Lundy shifted talk from petrol prices to telecommunications and wanted to know about operational separation of Telstra - splitting the infrastructure assets from retail operations.
Senator Lundy thanked the committee for its "indulgence", before bombing the ACCC's Graeme Samuel and Michael Cosgrave with questions about whether separation is working in Australia.
On the back of that questioning David Forman of the Competitive Carriers Coalition put out a press release stating "ACCC admits operational separation a failure".
The CCC represents Telstra's rivals. Senator Lundy is, Full Disclosure notes, David Foreman's wife.
Beer man in the box?
IT DOESN'T take long for the rumour mill to get trundling.
Just days have passed since Foster's Group boss Trevor O'Hoy took the rap
for the failure to integrate Southcorp into the beer business, but Full Disclosure's spies are already trying to identify his replacement.
The most amusing tip came from one who saw Visy Industries managing director John Murphy giving a speech at a Grupo Modelo conference in Mexico last week. Grupo Modelo owns the Corona brand and is Central America's biggest brewer. Continued…
