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Canada Upholds Net Neutrality Rules In Wireless TV Case
An anonymous reader writes Canada's telecom regulator has issued a major new
decision with implications for net neutrality, ruling that
Bell and Videotron violated the Telecommunications Act by granting
their own wireless television services an undue preference by
exempting them from data charges. Michael Geist examines
the decision, noting that the Commission grounded the decision
in net neutrality concerns, stating the Bell and Videotron services
"may end up inhibiting the introduction and growth of other mobile
TV services accessed over the Internet, which reduces innovation and
consumer choice."
Now, let's take the contrary to your position:
The wireless provider is no longer allowed to treat their own subscription offering as being different from, say, Netflix by pretending data which they're sending you is magically different than any other data -- which prevents them from undercutting other services by making those services artificially more expensive.
This basically allowed them to make competition obsolete by giving themselves an exemption, and treat their data packets as special.
This didn't help consumers, or competition ... it helped them get an unfair leg up because they own the network and could cheat.
Do you think people are well served when a company can undercut competition by rigging the system?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Trust me, we're quite jealous of what the FCC does down there as well - for we're often screwed up here.
For example - take cable services - we're required to buy a set top box from the provider - provided through the provider or a reseller, and that box cannot be moved to another provider even if they use the same equipment. Effectively, we're forced to buy equipment we can only use with the provider. We can't buy used equipment (except if it was originally sold by the provider), so no going to the US to buy cheap boxes, no going to another province, etc. Your box is locked to the provider, no one else in Canada will activate it. And if your box doesn't match any serial number the provider bought, they won't activate it either.
This includes stuff like broadband modems for internet too - if you're not happy with the cable modem your provider gives you, too f'in bad - you can't buy a different one because they won't activate it.
And it's only been a few years now that we've had cellphone number portability, and only within the last year that 3 year cellphone contracts have been eliminated, providers have to provide unlock codes for SIM locked phones, and no more surprise roaming charges and other stuff.
So for this one ruling, Canada's still a place where the telecommunications firms rule. Your FCC does a lot right in comparison.
The CRTC isn't corrupt, although they can sometimes get a skewed view of reality. They sometimes give too much weight to incumbent filings or taking on faith that the cost studies submitted by incumbents are accurate.
It's difficult to examine the cost studies, because they're filed under seal, so when Bell files a cost study that defines the tariff rates that independent ISPs have to pay, nobody can challenge the cost study.
Ironically, in one of the rare instances where Bell did expose a small part of one of their cost studies, it was found that they were costing out huge routers and then assuming a tiny usage of them. I think the specific case was Bell would include a 48 Gbps router in their cost study, and then claim that they only used 1Gbps of capacity on it. This meant 48x the cost for that part of the study, letting Bell charge more.
The CRTC did correct Bell's costs for that instance, but that is just the rare public thing we know about. How many other instances of fudging is there in cost studies that nobody ever gets the opportunity to challenge because they're filed in secret?
The independent ISPs have been asking for years to get the right to examine incumbent cost studies and other things that are filed under seal. The indies have proposed restrictions that would protect incumbent privacy, such as nominating a tiny number of people to see the data (such as a lawyer for the indie ISP), and to be under a nondisclosure agreement... the CRTC still hasn't done anything about it though. As a result, incumbent ISPs charge absurdly inflated costs for capacity to indie ISPs. I think Videotron is charging $23 per megabit for capacity on their last-mile network, and that's on top of all the other fees they charge like the cost of the DSL or cable line itself.