OTTAWA – While the media and telecom world grows exponentially in the digital age, some believe the CRTC may soon become a redundant organization attempting to adapt two Acts written more than 20 years ago while faced with the drumbeat of deregulation in favour of market forces.
However, others believe the CRTC is instead growing in influence, inefficiently expanding its powers in ways it shouldn’t be, hindering the telecom and broadcasting businesses and investment in Canada.
In presenting a paper to the Law Society of Upper Canada’s New Developments in Communications Law and Policy conference on Thursday, Bell Canada’s SVP regulatory and governmental affairs, Mirko Bibic, maintained it was the latter, and that the Commission must be reined in. The CRTC’s “inefficient processes and regulation hasn’t served any of the stakeholders,” he told conference delegates.
Instead of decreasing the regulatory burden and letting commercial forces come to negotiated agreements, “The pendulum has swung back towards heavily and complicated regulation,” added Bibic, “and what we rarely spend time talking about is what mechanism we have to keep the Regulator in check and hold them to their commitments and obligations.”
Bibic outlined the wholesale usage-based billing policy as an example of Commission inefficiency, a process which is now more than five years old. Back in 2007, the Commission told incumbent network operators they had to give independent ISPs access to their networks at the same speeds the network owners were offering to customers. That was appealed by Bell and reversed, but it didn’t stop there, with decisions and policies on the issue regularly released ever since.
“Over four years there were three review and varies and two cabinet appeals and two framework hearings and the end result was priceless,” said Bibic. “There was literally no price,” until the final 2011 step into a capacity-based system, which is now facing seven more review and vary demands.
“That’s not streamlined and efficient,” noted Bibic (who insisted he did not want to re-try that issue, but talk about the processes around it). He added no one did anything wrong and simply exercised their rights under the laws and policies, but this drawn out process shows how the Commission must be altered. “It cannot help an independent ISP to wait five years for access to an incumbent’s network if that’s what the Commission had decided,” said Bibic.
He also said using final offer arbitration as the last resort negotiation – something the Commission does on the broadcasting side, is an option that should be available for telecom disputes, too.
Speaking next, lawyer Christian Tacit (who has represented independent ISP Teksavvy) noted that it was often Bell appealing the CRTC decisions in this matter and that the company only had itself to blame for the never-ending process. “It was predominantly the incumbents who caused the delays,” he said.
“If you’re using that as the basis to say regulation should be more streamlined, it’s kind of a funny argument when they are causing the delay to begin with.”
From his point of view, the Commission has been streamlining its processes well and many of the delays centre around the lack of transparency in the data the big network providers supply to the CRTC, making it very difficult for the Regulator to make timely, informed decisions.
Besides, other than the wholesale rates under dispute, the Commission got the wholesale high speed internet access decision correct because it erred on the side of competition, said Tacit. “Competition is the desired economic objective,” he explained. “Premature deregulation would hurt everyone.”
