OTTAWA – The CRTC needs to be “split up in terms of the kinds of people making broadcasting decisions and the kinds of personnel making telecom decisions,” said Tim Denton, chairman of the Internet Society Canada Chapter (ISCC) at the two-day Policy 3.0 Communications Law conference organized by the Forum for Research and Policy in Communications last week.
Denton, a former CRTC commissioner who now works as a consultant on Internet and telecom policy, also called for the creation of a chief technology officer within the Commission to provide advice on current technology-related issues. He said the CRTC needs to have the ability “to gather information more effectively outside the hearing process” and share information with the Competition Bureau and other federal agencies, such as the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.
The ISCC already made its pitch for an overhaul of the CRTC in a detailed 44-page submission to the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel earlier this year.
In response to the question posed in the terms of reference for the review regarding governance and administration of telecommunications and radiocommunication, the ISCC said there should be either a “self-standing telecommunications regulatory agency or an independent telecommunications regulator that is functionally separate from broadcasting regulation within the CRTC.”
The ISCC also believes some spectrum management functions should be transferred away from Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada to the telecom regulator, and that federal legislation is required to address spectrum management and planning.
Denton echoed to Cartt.ca what he told the Policy 3.0 panel on the right to universal, affordable access to distribution systems that the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan and South Korea “make considered, massive interventions into their telecommunications-informatics structure to change things,” whereas Canada has taken a “timid” approach that has resulted in “very high prices, very slow rates of adoption, and a very comfy little triad of companies [Bell, Telus and Rogers] with market power stuffing money into investments outside of infrastructure development.”
However fellow panelist Laura Tribe, executive director of consumer group OpenMedia, accused the CRTC of not using its existing enforcement power over telecom.
She referred to the CRTC’s recent Report on Misleading or Aggressive Communications Retail Sales Practices, released earlier this year, in which the regulator acknowledged such practices “occur to an unacceptable degree” in the telecom service-provider market “and, to some extent, in the television-service provider market.”
Yet the CRTC, which initially said no to an investigation, offered no concrete plan to address the problem it discovered, said Tribe. “When you have a regulator that actually does an investigation, finds out there’s a problem and doesn’t do anything about it – yeah, they’re definitely failing to use the powers that they have,” she said.
The Commission, it should be noted, did warn in its February report it could decide to fine the carriers, and it also said it will undertake its own investigations by launching its own secret shopping program where staffers would keep tabs on the carriers’ sales operations.
Also – it was asked by the federal government for a report, which it carried out. That process was not a policy-producing public proceeding where decisions like the ones Tribe desires would emanate. For example, if the CRTC did want to start fining carriers for poor sales practices, it would have to convene a public proceeding first to figure out how to rightly do that.
Tribe’s comments were echoed by Katrine Dilay, a lawyer with Legal Aid Manitoba’s Public Interest Law Centre (PILC), who said that the CRTC does not “make appropriate and sufficient use of its existing consumer-protection powers.”
She said she believes the Regulator needs to better view its statutory mandate of overseeing Canadian telecom and broadcasting through the lens of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and not discriminate against people, such as on the basis of their socio-economic status.
