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CRTC To Allow Usage-Based Billing
Idiomatick writes "The CRTC ruled in favor this week for usage-based billing. Bell Canada was given a monopoly on lines in Canada, and in exchange they were made to resell to competitors at cost in order to have a functional market. The new CRTC ruling will allow Bell to charge their competitors more money based on individual customer usage. They are now able to implement a 60GB cap on a competitor's highest speed lines (charging $1.12/GB for overages). The effect on the market seems clear."
In Canada we have no competition for apparently 6 reasons:
- Previous governments gave a monopoly to friends who supported them. Where these monopolies have collided they don't compete.
- We have no working anti-monopoly laws in Canada preventing collusion and other anti-competitive behavior. Technically we do but please tell me the last time a company was fined and how little they might have been fined.
- The CRTC (our FCC) is the tool that previous governments used to give their friends these monopolies and thus the CRTC will enforce the monopolies behavior not prevent it.
- Any competition that poses an actual threat will be bought out.
- The present government is a minority government and thus is focused on other fish that need frying such as keeping power and maybe finagling a majority. How many bytes people can download is not on their radar for now.
- Many of the telco monopolies also are media giants thus they control what the pubic thinks about this stuff.