Dissenting opinion says process to alert competitors must be better
By Ahmad Hathout
The CRTC approved Monday a proposal by Northwestel to offer former customers discounts on certain internet packages to bring them back on board.
The promotion, proposed in August, would apply to 12 new internet packages with unlimited data and would run for six months in the far north. Eligible customers are those who had previously been a Northwestel customer for at least a month, who have been gone for at least the same amount of time, and who have been subscribed to another service provider in Northwestel’s operating territory.
The commission, which must check Northwestel because of its dominant position in the region, approved the discounts because they are above a price floor – below which the provider could throw its weight around to the detriment of competition – and could assist in promoting competition.
“The Commission believes that Northwestel’s proposed discounted packages would make a positive contribution to competition in the residential Internet service market,” the CRTC said Monday. “Returning customers will benefit from Northwestel’s proposed discounted packages, and the introduction of such offers should encourage competition in the market resulting in more choices for customers.”
The commission, which is currently looking into how to implement a wider internet subsidy in the region, noted in a 2022 decision that the advent of satellite services, such as SpaceX’s Starlink, has added competition in that market. Starlink, the CRTC said Monday, would likely be perceived by customers as comparable to Northwestel’s wired services and the American satellite company’s monthly service rates were lower than Northwestel’s on similar speeds.
And Starlink, as well as other providers in the region, may have had something to say about the uncontested winback proposal had the process by which tariff applications are dealt with been better, according to a joint dissenting opinion.
Ontario Commissioner Bram Abramson and British Columbia and Yukon Commissioner Claire Anderson said the CRTC should have asked Northwestel to notify its competitors in the region about its application. “Northwestel’s doing so would have created a better case for considering that these providers, opposed in interest to Northwestel, had nothing to add to the file,” the dissent reads.
Part of the problem, the two go on, is that while the tariff procedure was intended to speed up the process on those matters, it also stored those applications deep into a part of the CRTC website with the expectation that interested parties would have a system in place to see them.
“Competitors come in all shapes and size. But as to the assumptions that all will trawl the CRTC’s website incessantly for an application of potential interest, or set up website-watching agents to do it for them, or even that an efficient market will birth a commercial service to alert them of it – none of these have materialized,” the opinion continues. “As suggested elsewhere, conflating a lack of interventions with implied consent awards the tie to the applicant, as it were, and creates a recipe for loopholes as a result.”
The two commissioners suggested the CRTC delete from the rules of practice and procedure subsection 59(2), which exempts tariff applications from other sections stipulating the commission can direct such applications be served on any respondent.
