[Natsu]

I wonder, however, if the power company will itself actually suffer $183,000 in damages. Every time I've heard of someone accidentally racking up insane charges like this, they've been able to negotiate it to something reasonable.

So I do believe that knowing the true damages, and not just the dollar figure specified by the contract, is relevant here.

[hugh3]

The power company is presumably already forking over a huge amount of money to Telstra every month for data. This one event would have been a spike, but not a crazy dominant one.

If you or I accidentally ran up $200K in charges due to somebody stealing our SIM then yes, we could probably negotiate it down. In a big-business-to-big-business context, though, Telstra is as likely as not to say "Hey look, that's what the contract says, you signed it, so suck it".

Without any information to the contrary, I'm willing to believe that if the court decided that the actual damages to the power company were $183,000, then the actual damages were $183,000.