Telecom was fined $12 million for breaching section 36 of the Commerce Act in April 2011. The High Court determined that from 2001 to 2004 Telecom unlawfully leveraged its market power to charge downstream competitors disproportionately high prices for wholesale access to its network, preventing them from offering retail end-to-end high-speed data services on a competitive basis. The sentence was appealed by Telecom and the Court of Appeal upheld the penalty.
