NOT LONG AGO I ASKED A CRTC senior policy advisor I know how work was going. It was one of those just-making-conversation questions we all ask, but I was a little surprised at his response:
“Livin’ the dream,” he excitedly told me. Now, I’m not sure my facial expression betrayed my wonder at that statement and I don’t remember what I said next, but he continued to add that he found it exciting, interesting and fun to debate and then help craft what would become the “law of the land.”
Upon reflection, it shouldn’t have come as such a shock – and we should be pleased that most of the folks who work for our telecom and broadcast regulator feel this way: That they enjoy their work and take it seriously; and they know what they do is a big deal and affects us all.
In fact, most people I’ve met from the Commission are like that.
Which makes all of the recent false, hypocritical bullshit, the ill-informed partisan political nonsense and deliberate undermining of the CRTC by so many all the worse.
Clearly if you take a job at the CRTC, one would expect you’d have to have a thick skin. The Commission is burned at the virtual stake for so much of what happens and doesn’t happen in Canadian media it’s darkly comic sometimes. The Regulator is a very easy target. Now, no one expects Joe and Jane Bagadonuts, your everyday Canadians, to know how telecom and broadcasting policies – and the laws from which those policies spring – work. If they want to blame the CRTC for the limited library of Netflix in Canada or what ISPs charge for broadband or what they can’t find on iTunes, well, that’s just what they’re going to do.
Maybe I’m naive but I expect a higher standard from our country’s politicians. While sitting in on the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology last week during CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein’s appearance, the words “stupefying”, “lame-brained”, “weak” and others kept popping into my head whenever an MP had the floor.
It seemed as though the only thing the committee members were briefed on were ways to take the UBB issue and make it a partisan plot. Facts were ignored. I can’t even be certain the MPs were listening to von Finckenstein because he was asked the same set of questions repeatedly.
NDP MP Brian Massey’s persistent line of confused questioning about how the CRTC has made it so university students somehow subsidize the broadband usage of big businesses like IBM was ludicrous. He appeared unaware that large corporations negotiate their own individual deals with network providers and are not even on the same network as the university student down the road.
The rest of the committee members were not much better.
However, I’m saving the most of my disappointment for Industry Minister, Tony Clement. I’ve spoken with the minister on several occasions. I like him a lot. His tweeting is usually skilful (really, doing it right is a skill) and the fact he’ll often answer questions from just about anyone via Twitter is refreshing. He is a responsive, communicative minister, but his and the Prime Minister’s virtual evisceration of the Commission on UBB was just wrong. It was pure political gamesmanship. Nothing else.
They saw an issue that resonated with Canadians (monthly ISP rates and bandwidth caps), coupled with the country’s easiest target (the CRTC), and attacked. Facts be damned. So the Commission is going to review its decision.
Nevermind the very small number of people who may be affected by the wholesale UBB decision. Nevermind that most Canadians believe that paying for resources you use (in this case the network resources of the big ISPs) is a fair thing for companies to ask.
The most hypocritical aspect of it all though is that the government said nevermind to the fact that the CRTC had and has acted, often, against the wishes of the big ISPs to make sure the likes of TekSavvy, Primus and others can exist in the first place.
In August 2010, the CRTC stuck to its guns and sided with the small ISPs.
All that said, the massive wave of confusion spurred by the political interference, all the online vitriol and misinformation, the poor job of consumer education done by the big ISPs themselves (as we noted), Shaw’s decision to let the customers in on its decision-making and now this – billing mistakes by Bell on customers who may have not exceeded their GB usage means one thing.
Usage-based billing is dead. Dead, dead, dead.
No matter the reasoning. No matter the logic. Continuing to defend this practice – which doesn’t offend me and it’s something I have supported – is just no longer tenable for the likes of Rogers, Bell, Telus, Cogeco and Videotron.
The big ISPs will eventually have to decide what their new limit is (let’s say its 350 GB of data, the level of Shaw’s Nitro service) and set an all-in price. They’ll continue to sell speed tiers, but the days of charging for 5, 10, 25, 50 GB data transfer packages appear over. They have to be. The anger over this is not going to subside and something has to give. And besides, if so few customers are hitting their GB limits, as the ISPs have all said, what’s the harm in raising them?
UBB is viewed as an unreasonable, anti-consumer cash grab – about on par with cable’s negative option billing fiasco of the mid-1990s. Back then there were no web sites or blogs, no Facebook or Twitter, and the industry had to cave.
Even the operators who don’t have bit caps have been caught up by it. Source Cable, which serves about 19,000 cable, phone and internet customers in Hamilton, Ont. has no GB thresholds to limit its customers but they had to deal with calls from some of them who mistakenly demanded to know why they had GB limits.
“To be honest with you, the costs for the bandwidth has come down over the years, which is a significant factor and we just never really felt at this point that we needed to implement that,” said company president Dan Campbell in an interview Tuesday.
He noted there are a few subscribers who “really abuse the system” with the amount of data that moves through their modems but having a more open service is a serious advantage over its competition, chiefly, Bell. “I feel it’s a great selling tool for Source,” said Campbell. “As it turns out we’re pretty much the only one that doesn’t have caps, I believe, in our market.”
“We could do it, but at this point in time, I don’t really see the use in clamping it down.”
TekSavvy’s Rocky Gaudreault has called the imposition of UBB on his company and other third party ISPs, “price fixing”, a statement that has a tendency to stick. He said it Tuesday during his own appearance at the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology.
“The problem is by imposing UBB as retail structures to the competitive groups, then there’s no more options and all of a sudden, if someone wants to not have a UBB option, they have no where to go,” he said Wednesday in a follow-up interview.
“If Bell wants to charge a cap, who cares, let them do it. That’s their business decision. But, to impose it on everyone else, it becomes price fixing because if Bell does it to us, we have to do it,” explained Gaudreault.
Soon, these low GB thresholds must disappear. Consumers are screaming for it (nearly half a million people have signed this petition), market pressure is growing, the political interference is ham-handed and persistent, so right or not, UBB is dead.
