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Canadian ISPs Fight Back, Again
jenningsthecat writes "With the recent CRTC decision giving Canadian telcos such as Bell and Telus the legal right to deny third-party ISPs access to their infrastructure, smaller Canadian Internet providers are again fighting for their lives, and are asking their customers for help. The ISPs are seeking public support, asking people to go to competitivebroadband.com to send either a form letter or a personalized message to the Industry Minister, the Prime Minister, the Opposition Leader, and optionally the respondent's local Minister of Parliament. If the CRTC's decision is not overturned, approximately 30 ISPs will likely be forced out of business. Competition in the ADSL market will be totally eliminated, and Canadians will have only two choices for wired Internet access: the local Cableco or the local Telco. Given that Canadian taxpayers have heavily subsidized the telcos in multiple ways for several decades, this decision to hand over exclusive control of the keys to the cookie jar hardly seems fair."
The thing you are missing is that the infrastructure was build with government money. The competition is unfair because the big telco "own" the networks and if you don't have the government forcing them to sell their network capacity to the smaller ISPs then they will stop selling to the ISP or sell at high rates and then sell at low rates to their customers. This will put all the smaller ISPs out of business and once they are gone the big telco can jack up their prices because they have no competition.
Monopoly, American style!
Seriously, O Canada, don't emulate us on this one. America needs the "Crazy Uncle" to the north to provide some alternatives to business as usual.
Frankly, if I were Bell and the CRTC said I could do so, I would stop offering wholesale internet altogether immediately.
What business wouldn't love the opportunity to instantly and permanently kill all its competitors except those on completely different lines? Why adjust prices when you can just kill them off?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
But the government has given these companies a monopoly over the infrastructure. If the government granted you the same monopoly then it's not a matter of your freedom to set your own prices, it's a matter of your obligation to the government and the public for being granted that monopoly.
What new ISP's? The existing ones have a, say it with me, monopoly. A government granted (and enforced) monopoly at that.
I think you've completely missed the entire issue here. The government historically regulated the prices and forced these ISP's to open up their lines to allow true competition so that the unhappy customers could go to a new ISP. But now they're allowing these ISP's to set the prices for their competitors. They're forced to sell access to their network (due to their monopoly status), previously they were forced to do so in such a way that other ISPs could compete with them, but now they can just set such a high price that their offering is the cheapest on the market, driving the smaller ISP's out of business.
The ISP I worked for for ten years, and was the system/network admin for for seven of those years went under because Telus and Shaw basically set up a scenario in which we couldn't compete with them. Yes, we did have a fiber connection via Shaw's Big Pipe subsidiary, but it was damned pricey. Worse was Telus's stranglehold on the PRI dialup lines. Worst of all was that while both technically were supposed to open their networks to us so we could resell DSL or cable, the hoops one had to jump through and the poverty-level profit margins they allowed made it all but pointless. In the end, we tried to roll out our own WiFi, but geographically or area just wasn't conducive to that.
The whole deck was stacked from the very beginning, and the CRTC, despite all these grand proclamations of protecting competition, had already handed the keys to the kingdom. To be honest with you, if I were a small ISP now, I'd close shop. There's no money in it any more.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There won't be new ISP's taking their place because you can't run a second set of cables throughout the city/region/whatever at a competitive price. Because the previous guys got subsidized.
Possibly you can't do so at any cost because the previous guys where granted exclusive rights or because it's politically impossible to get permission now. Though that's irrelevant due to not being able to afford it if you could anyway.
Corruption and lobbying.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Seriously, you do NOT want to have to deal with Bell Canada customer service or support for any reason whatsoever. They are legendary for the atrocious level of customer care, for bilking their customers, for owing customers money but never giving it back, for simply getting every last little thing amazingly wrong, for the amounts of pain inflicted and for their sheer level of unfairness.
I remember when I got my first telephone line back in the mid-80's, within months I had an unexplained and impossible charge, and I simply couldn't contest the charge - it was either pay it plus (growing) interest or have no phone.
My god, recently I moved to an apartment and had to endure two months of support calls to get my line moved too, and a Bell representative tried to sell me something called Line Insurance - basically, for an extra $20/mo it would guarantee that this sort of thing didn't happen. They wanted to charge me extra to ensure that I got what I already paid for! Can you imagine?!
No, Bell Canada is evil incarnate and must die.
Market forces? Is this some kind a a euphemism for monopolies, anti-competitive practices and union busting? Because that's the only context I ever hear it used in.
Wake up. Wake up you and all the other "free market" drones around here. The "Free market" does not, has not and will not ever exist. Period. It is a pipe dream concocted from the ramblings of economists, most of whom were in the employ of powerful groups who would like nothing better than a free hand to do as they please in any sector of the economy or society in general. It is, at best and idealised theoretical utopia, worthy only of consideration as a thought experiment. If that.
In reality, you cannot separate economics from the general deviousness, manipulation, underhandedness and skullduggary that goes on in almost every walk of human life. People game system and companies, especially big companies, will game the system up to and quite often past the point where they can get away with it. In this reality, on this planet Earth, your free market theories are about as applicable as theories of anti-matter.
The big telco's are going to degrade service, cripple and destroy all competition, punitively raise prices and in general wreck the whole internet unless there is strong government regulation in place to prevent them from doing so. Platitudes about the efficiency of private industry and the prices "the market" will bear are just that. Platitudes, carrying no more weight than a dry tissue. History, and indeed recent events, have demonstrated quite conclusively that no major industry can be left to its own devices, ever . It simply does not work. The prime, prime, prime example was the recent financial crash. But there are many other examples across all industries.
The internet is now one of the foundations of our society and we cannot allow it to be held to ransom by a handful of individuals hiding behind corporate veils and pandering economics.
May the Maths Be with you!