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"The stalking horses for fed-up Kiwi blue chips began ganging up on Paula Rebstock," the Herald's Fran O'Sullivan writes, partly because she wanted to change anti-competitive termination pricing on wireless. About a decade ago, all the thinkers on this decided that minimizing termination was the way to go, as we've since heard from Pepper at the FCC and Vivianne Reding at the EU.

O'Sullivan suggests Telecom New Zealand stuck the knife in her back, noting "Chapman Tripp partner Grant David - who says he is not acting on behalf of his legal firm's clients like Telecom which has frequently been in the commission's sights." Paul Reynolds is a good guy whom I would suspect would rather have nothing to do with politics, but he's responsible for his company's success and TNZ has been in trouble lately.

There's a fair amount of competition for the wireless customer in most countries, which brings down prices somewhat even if it is limited in many ways. But there's zero competition for completing the call. If I want to call you, my carrier has to pay whatever termination fee your carrier demands. With near-perfect competition whatever the carrier collect would flow through and reduce consumer prices. With imperfect competition, the carriers get to pocket most of it. That's the theory.  The loud squawks across the EU about how much profit the carriers will lose with Reding's fee reduction suggests the theory is on target.

O'Sullivan continued. "Rebstock stood on plenty of powerful toes during her five years as chairwoman of the New Zealand Commerce Commission. When she started going after the cartels, she found plenty of evidence of deliberate anti-competitive behaviour by companies that should have known better.

Mutterings around town about "that woman" increasingly got louder as boards and management of the misbehaving firms used the jawbone to try and deflect attention away from their own errant behaviour. ... She appears not to have heeded the Kiwi survival motto - "rotate your victims" - essential to staying alive in any role that requires frequent recourse to combat mode in an urban village of a mere four million people."  http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10562186&pnum=0