We do have some reservations about Garry's piece. He seems completely satisfied with the Telstra line that it was kicked out of the tender process on "what looks like a thin bureaucratic ploy" and that the Government is damaging the share value of the company.

We tend to agree with The 7.30 Report that Telstra knocked itself out of the ring. And we can't quite understand why the Government should be responsible for maintaining Telstra's share price. Isn't that what privatisation is all about?

Garry declares: "Love it or hate it — and many people do for no more logical a reason than it is Telstra, which used to be Telecom Australia, which used to be the PMG, and we hated them, too — Telstra is the only real game in town."

Well we can't recall hating the PMG, and for that matter we don't hate Telstra, although we're sure that the Telstra executives who go out of their way to silence Bleeding Edge and deny us access to information are convinced we hate them. Hating a corporation's behaviour isnt the same thing as hating the corporation. Isn't it possible that some of us object to Telstra's tactics on completely rational grounds that have nothing to do with hatred? We can't help feeling mildly patronised when what we regard as perfectly reasonable objections are dismissed as an immature emotional reaction. Will we be grown-ups only when we stop objecting to being ripped off? That sort of comment represents an insult to the reader's intelligence, in our view.

It isn't childish to object to Telstra's tactics in pursuit of maintaining its monopoly. It isn't immature to believe that Telstra might have fared better had it not been so hell-bent on exploiting its monopoly position and sacrificing the best interests of its customers and the nation for its own commercial greed.

One is surely entitled to form the opinion that Telstra's views on what constitute a fair return on investment threaten the strangulation of Australian businesses which increasingly find Telstra's charges make it impossible to compete with overseas competitors. It seems undeniable to us that if Telstra is the only game in town, it's a bloody expensive game, and not all of us are going to be able to afford to play.

Garry says that in dramatically increasing the speed of its HFC cable network, Telstra has picked the plums out of the telecommunications pie, which agrees with Stephen Bartholomeusz's intepretation, although Stephen says it's a cherry pie.

The question Garry poses is whether the Government considered HFC when it drew up its tender "or, as Telstra has suggested, were bidders restricted to fibre to the node (FTTN), for which access to (Telstra says confiscation of) Telstra's wires from telephone exchanges to nodes and then to premises was essential?"

We're possibly misguided here, but wasn't FTTN Sol Trujillo's idea? Wasn't he intent on rolling out FTTN, if only the Government abandoned its old-fashioned regulatory requirements that would have allowed its competitors access to the network?

We almost choked when David Quilty, Telstra's public policy chief, assaying the prospect that Canberra might legislate to stop Telstra's cherry or plum picking, told the ABC it was “somewhat of an outrage if a bidder who purports to support competition is actually asking for a statutory monopoly”. Apparently it's only OK to ask for a statutory monopoly if you don't purport to support competition. Certainly, by its every deed and public pronouncement, Telstra has been outraged by the concepts of fair competition and level playing grounds. It feels completely entitled to extortionate rates of return.

No doubt we're exposing our naivete here, but if HFC was the solution all along, why didn't Trujillo just say so? Why was he so insistent that we had to have fibre to the node? We can't help but think that ulterior motives involving the crushing of potential competition were at work. We agree, by the way, that we need fibre, although in our opinion, we need fibre to the home, rather than to the node.

Experts on The 7.30 Report seem confident that last year's High Court decision that the telecommunications access regime did not constitute acquisition of Telstra's property make the NBN plain sailing.

David Lindsay, senior lecturer in law at Monash University has a completely different interpretation of that decision. In an article in the Telecommunications Journal of Australia last year, he suggested that court's expansive understanding of what amounts to an 'acquisition of property' under s 51(xxxi), however, suggests that proposals for greater regulatory intervention, including structural separation and divestiture of the access network, may well amount to a breach of Section 51(xxxi) of the Constitution, requiring payment of compensation to Telstra. We're grateful to Kevin Morgan for pointing that article out to us. If David Lindsay is right (and his arguments look pretty sound) quite how the Government proposes to legislate its way around that isn't obvious to us.

David Quilty's comment that "the important thing in terms of any cost we might incur in terms of interconnection [of the NBN to the CAN] that we're fully reimbursed for those costs up front" surely must have sent a chill up Senator Conroy's spine.

We can't help but feel that The 7.30 Report has taken an unnecessarily optimistic view on this issue. Kevin Morgan's view of the outcome - and Garry's - seem more compelling to us. But any public breast-beating on behalf of Telstra makes us gag. Obviously that's just our emotions getting in the way again.

LATEST: Five views from a panel at the Comms Day Summit.