Canada still wants to "discipline the use of the Internet"
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Charging more for less won't provide incentive for companies to "invest in maintaining the internet", though.
I don't believe in government interference.
Giving more incentive for better encoding is also a valid point. Netflix offered 10 million for better recommendations. I'd like to see them offer the same thing for better encoding.
In Canada, government regulation and taxpayer money played a significant role in building the infrastructure. In the US, government granted monopolies built the infrastructure and still serve to squeeze out competition.
Government interference isn't a shiny new monster imposing itself on private sector infrastructure. Rather it has been a key player since the beginning and shaped the market in ways that need to be accounted for.
> I don't believe in government interference.
Nobody is downloading that crap - there is no way there is any bandwidth
The whole article seems ludicrous. "Discipline" internet usage? As if it's inherently bad or something?
The issue, AFAIK, with the market "sorting things out", is that there are few companies that have gotten government permission to build out end networks. I'd guess it's near impossible for a new company to get access to actually lay out copper everywhere.
Eventually, the last stretch will get (yet) fatter. In the meantime, I've not seen discussion of possible interim workarounds. Such as e.g. Netflix enabling, on devices having sufficient storage, time-shifted, queued downloading. For example, during the work/school day, when residential usage is low, they could pump down the next film or three in your queue.
Similar to electrical power generation, efficiencies are gained by leveling demand.
Perhaps we're too impulsive in our choices. Also, it would place entire (DRM-ed?) movies at once onto local media -- possibly a concern. But it seems to me to be one approach, if "last mile" really is a problem and the different parties could actually cooperate instead of simply hoarding the pie.
Side benefit: No congestion interruptions and artifacts.
In fact, I believe almost every ISP - unless they're monopoly - would be happy to drop the prices while keeping the satisfable service quality. Unfortunately, most of time they just can't (and when they can, they surely do).
Also, while it's certainly none of my business, I sometimes wonder why some individuals download terabytes of information per month. Considering the most heavy application I know of - downloading raw BD rips - they have to watch a movie every single evening. Must be quite a bad taste for a videophile, to say the least. For less traffic-heavy content, they just won't be able to consume it in time. I'm not saying that terabytes are not needed - sure there're cases where even petabytes might be necessary - but there're too many users who download whole day and night every month. Well, at least the Internets are backed up...
Canadian telecoms are some of the most profitable companies in the country. The "no incentive to invest" has been because they can charge whatever they want for their service, milking the aging infrastructure they "own" that taxpayers heavily subsidized.
Why invest early and often if you can just crank up your rates when things eventually break down?
For instance, if Bell charged the ISP's $7 for renting that "last mile" + 5 cents for each gigabyte, charging the same for 1st and the 500th gigabyte, it'd be a lot harder to argue against UBB. But when they charge $2 per gigabyte but then allow you to pay $5 for 40 gigabytes a block, but only a maximum of 3 blocks, it's obvious to everybody that those prices are bogus and pure gravy.
To grab customers from the competition of course?
Consumers will move from congested ISPs to unccongested ones, this provides incentive for all ISPs to be as uncongested as possible if they want to keep their customers and revenues.
Of course, this presumes there's actual competition between ISPs and that consumers can choose freely, which is why this inherently stupid discussion is only present in parts of the US and Canada.
What he utterly fails to account for is the fact that the costs to provide a certain level of bandwidth have been dropping dramatically. You could simply be making regular, equal investments every year and that would be enough to see bandwidth rise in line with consumption. Yes, a 50% year-over-year increase in consumption is matched be a 50-60% year-over-year cost decrease.
Furthermore, Bell (for example) has little incentive to upgrade early and often if they can charge whatever they want. They can simply milk their creaky infrastructure until it breaks down (infrastructure that was heavily subsidized by the taxpayer), and then simply increase their rates to cover the costs of investments they should have made a long time ago if they didn't act according to perverse incentives.
From another angle, fast, ubiquitous, unlimited (for all intents-and-purposes) internet should be a policy objective for our government. Countries that have made heavy investment in internet infrastructure, like South Korea and Japan, are reaping the rewards. This will only become more important.
Canada also has THE most expensive internet access among OECD countries. Period. Full stop.
Finally, this ruling was about imposing UBB on 3rd-party providers, not about UBB in general. Teksavvy already had caps at 200GB and a more expensive plan that offered unlimited access, and as many people don't seem to understand, they're not using Bell's backhaul. They operate their own - they just need to access the last mile infrastructure because it's a bloody duopoly.
I could go on and on and on, but suffice it to say that David is just plain wrong here. It IS as one-sided as we think.
The only people that want this are Bell and the CRTC whose job it is to regulate Bell but whose members essentially rotate in and out of the CRTC and the companies they regulate. It's corrupt to the core.