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…
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MONTREAL – To no great surprise, Québecor has appealed CRTC decision compelling TVA Sports to continue providing its signal to Bell TV customers while in dispute with Bell Canada over its distribution agreement.
Quebecor argues the CRTC does not have jurisdiction to regulate affiliation agreements between BDUs and programmers this way; that it does not have jurisdiction to control the financial relationships between BDUs and programmers and that the powers invoked by the CRTC are far from the objectives of the Broadcasting Act, which are cultural in nature and focus on content.
The Federal Court of Appeal must…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC has ordered a bevy of broadcasters to get it the information that it asked for so that it may move forward with its plan to update the policy on Canadian programming expenditures (CPE).
The Commission on Friday issued a direction to comply with a request for information to 14 broadcasters for their data on revenues and expenditures associated with their digital media broadcasting activities, specifically in the context of CPE. While some of the 20 broadcasters who received the request for information letter in March have complied, the Regulator received joint reply from 14…
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OTTAWA–GATINEAU – The CRTC is once again seeking volunteers to help it measure the performance of home wireline broadband Internet services provided by the country’s major Internet service providers.
Under the Measuring Broadband Canada program, the Commission will work in collaboration with ISPs and broadband testing firm SamKnows to measure broadband performance and test parameters associated with the broadband Internet connection, including download and upload speeds.
While some providers offer advertised speeds of 1Gbps or faster, services above 940Mbps cannot be measured with a conventional speed test, meaning that speed tiers of 1Gbps or faster are excluded from the 2019 Measuring…
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TORONTO – Canada’s three big private broadcasters, Bell Media, Corus Entertainment, and Rogers Media, have petitioned the CRTC to exempt them from providing described video to non-Canadian programs received less than 72 hours prior to broadcast without described video.
The Canadian National Institute for the Blind is not happy.
This would be contrary to a mandate from the CRTC where broadcasters were told to provide described video for all shows during prime-time hours starting in September 2019.
TVA has asked the CRTC to relax their conditions, too.
In 2015, the CRTC announced plans to increase the availability of described video and mandated that…
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Needs local data for a proper analysis
OTTAWA – It’s rare for a bureaucratic back-and-forth to be quite so public, but with so much at stake, the Commissioner for Competition doesn’t want to take no for an answer when it comes to the granular market data he wants from Canadian wireless companies.
As part of its submission to the CRTC’s review of mobile wireless services, the Competition Bureau wants to do a detailed study on what happened in regions and cities (not just in provinces and nationally) when new wireless competitors to the Big Three (Rogers, Bell and Telus) were introduced….
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MONTREAL — Leclerc Communication has decided to abandon its deal to acquire two Quebec radio stations after the CRTC refused to approve a key part of the deal on Tuesday.
Leclerc had sought an exception to the CRTC's common ownership policy in order to control a third French-language FM radio station in Quebec City — top-rated talk station CHOI-FM. It had agreed to acquire CHOI and Montreal's CKLX-FM from RNC Media for $19 million last year.
At the CRTC hearing in February, Leclerc vice-president Jean-François Leclerc made clear that if the request for an exception to the…
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OTTAWA – An application by the SouthWestern Integrated Fibre Technology Inc. (SWIFT) petitioning the CRTC to reconsider how it qualifies rural regions to receive broadband funding was denied by the Commission on Monday.
As Cartt.ca reported in December, SWIFT took issue with the portion of the CRTC’s $750 million rural broadband fund that proposed the use of hexagon methodology to determine geographic eligibility for fixed broadband Internet access service projects.
SWIFT submitted that there was substantial doubt in both law and fact as to the correctness of the Commission’s determinations, asserting that they were likely…
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OTTAWA – Back in 2015, the CRTC concluded a review of telecommunications wholesale wireline services. In that decision the Commission set a speed threshold for aggregated wholesale services of 100 Mbps.
In November 2018, the Canadian Network Operators Consortium (CNOC) filed an application to review and vary the 2015 decision. Amongst others, CNOC sought, the removal of the Speed Cap on aggregated wholesale services on an expedited basis.
On March 20, 2019, the CRTC granted that interim relief while it continued to examine the file in front of it.
As said Chris Seidl, Executive Director, Telecommunications, in…
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“Individuals can’t hide behind their company’s structure or online entities”
OTTAWA – The CRTC has nailed the corporate director of a business caught violating Canada's anti-spam legislation (CASL), the first time that an individual is held liable under CASL for violations committed by a corporation.
The Commission on Tuesday fined Brian Conley $100,000 after an investigation determined that his discount deals website nCrowd sent unsolicited commercial emails to Canadians without their consent. In addition, the unsubscribe mechanism in the emails did not function properly.
Operating under multiple business names such as nCrowd, Teambuy, DealFind, and Dealathons, the emails offered promotional vouchers…
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