GATINEAU – The CRTC has told online gamers that its complaints over Rogers network management policies have been heard and that the big ISP may face some sort of penalty or public hearing.
According to a news release Thursday evening from Openmedia.ca, the Canadian Gamers Organization was told by the Commission in a letter on Thursday from chief compliance and enforcement officer Andrea Rosen that its ongoing complaints against Rogers will be referred to the Commission’s Compliance and Enforcement Sector for further action.
The gamers say that Rogers’ throttling of peer-to-peer traffic is a major impediment to online game playing, especially World of Warcraft.
“Though the exact nature of the penalty Rogers will face is still unknown, the CGO and pro-Internet organization OpenMedia.ca, are glad to see the CRTC finally recognize that Rogers has been breaking rules and restricting online choice,” reads the OpenMedia release.
While the Commission has no power to level administrative monetary penalties or other fines, paragraph 19 of the CRTC’s Telecom Information Bulletin 2011-609 sheds some light as to the next steps.
19. If the Telecommunications branch considers that the ITMP is not compliant with the ITMP policy and/or with the Act, based on either its review of individual complaints or its observation of statistical patterns among individual complaints of a similar nature about a specific ISP, the Commission’s Compliance and Enforcement branch may take one or more of the following actions:
• request more information from either the ISP or the complainant;
• request a compliance meeting with the ISP to discuss the complaint in more detail;
• send a letter to the ISP outlining corrective measures if it considers that the ISP’s ITMP does not comply with the ITMP policy and/or with the Act;
• initiate an on-site inspection or independent third-party audit to obtain additional information;
• initiate the issuance of a notice of consultation; and/or
• initiate a hearing at which the ISP would have to show cause as to why the Commission should not issue a mandatory order, which the Commission could register with the Federal Court
* the mandatory order would direct the ISP to take corrective actions under section 51 of the Act, and could include partial reimbursement to the customer.
This dispute has gone on for some time with reams of letters already sent back and forth, so a third-party inspection and hearing just may well be the next steps, although no decision has yet been taken by the Commission.
– Greg O’Brien
