March 2023] response to the non-periodic reporting notice". This establishes the basis of the communication as being that "Twitter" had already responded to the notice. The questions were thus described in the email and its attachment as "follow-up questions" to clarify some of the responses. Tellingly, Thomson Geer in its letter of 20 April 2023 understood that they were "follow-up questions". In context, the Commissioner's email of 6 April 2023 should be understood as assuming that a response had already been given, and moving on to consequential matters, rather than allowing more time for a response to be given.
170 While the Commissioner's covering email of 6 April 2023 and its attachment referred to providing Twitter with "another opportunity to respond", I do not regard this as amounting to the Commissioner allowing further time to respond to the initial notice. My principal reason is that the paragraphs numbered "3" of both the covering email and the attachment asked Twitter to "provide specific reasons to help eSafety assess Twitter's compliance with the Notice". This was a reference to the reporting notice that had to be complied with by 29 March 2023, and is inconsistent with any idea that there was any allowance of extra time for compliance. Read fairly, and in its statutory context, the information requested went to whether X Corp had complied with the notice, where s 57 required a person to comply "to the extent that the person is capable of doing so".
171 Nor does the fact that the 6 April 2023 email from the Commissioner's office specified a deadline for responses to the follow-up questions gainsay this analysis. True, the deadline is not referable to any power under the Online Safety Act to stipulate a time within which follow-up questions must be answered. But the deadline simply reflects the pragmatic demands of administration: the Commissioner's office was requesting answers to the follow-up questions by a certain time, so that the Commissioner could act accordingly. The deadline does not imply that the time for responding to the reporting notice itself had been extended.
172 For these reasons, this aspect of X Corp's challenge to the infringement notice fails.
Analysis of the second alternative issue — the claimed failure of the infringement notice to identify the place of the alleged contravention
173 Section 104(1)(e)(iii) of the Regulatory Powers Act relevantly provides that "[a]n infringement notice must … give brief details of … each alleged contravention … to which the notice relates, including … the place of … each alleged contravention".
