LONDON – In his speech this morning to the London Chamber of Commerce, CRTC chairman Jean-Pierre Blais announced a Commission decision which said Bell and Vidéotron were providing themselves undue preferences by letting customers stream programming without it counting against their bandwidth caps like all other streamed video.
“In November 2013, the CRTC received an application – filed by a University of Manitoba graduate student named Ben Klass – complaining about an alleged undue preference on the part of Bell Mobility. A similar application, filed against Vidéotron, followed a few weeks later,” outlined Blais.
“The problem in these cases was that Bell and Vidéotron exempted these services from their customers’ standard monthly data caps and data charges. But if a subscriber watched YouTube videos, that data would count against his or her cap. That, said the applicants, was unfair.
“We agreed,” said Blais. “In our opinion, providers such as Bell and Vidéotron that offer linear content via their mobile TV apps cannot provide undue preferences or advantages. We therefore ordered Bell and Vidéotron to eliminate their unlawful practices.”
This is about more than just a few thousand Bell or Vidéotron customers streaming proprietary content to their phones. It’s fundamentally about an open, equal and fair market, he added. “The CRTC always wants to ensure ¬– and this decision supports this goal ¬– that Canadians have fair and reasonable access to content… We also want to ensure that abuses of power in the system do not go unchecked.
“It may be tempting for large vertically integrated companies to offer certain perks to their customers, and innovation in its purest form is to be applauded. By all means, we at the CRTC want broadcasters to move television forward by creating new and exciting ways to view content. But when the impetus to innovate steps on the toes of the principle of fair and open access to content, we will intervene.”
