The CRTC tries to eliminate ISP competition in Canada | Hacker News Reader

The CRTC tries to eliminate ISP competition in Canada

antoniocangiano.com

17 pointsacangiano8 comments

Canada has a serious anti-competition problem. It doesn't allow foreign telecommunication providers in, the government allowed the formation of a monopoly book seller (Indigo/Chapters/Coles) and Indigo attempted to prevent Amazon from selling within Canada. The government is pathetic, they claim it helps Canadian industry when really it just gives the companies carte blanche for abuse.

Bell was once government owned and still acts like it, and the government still acts like it. It's pathetic and is hurting consumers, but higher prices means more taxes so of course the government doesn't care.

Actually, if I remember correctly Bell was not own by the government, Telus was. Over time Bell as sold and bought different telephone services from or to the provincial governments.

It was however granted a monopoly by the government on long distance, and by some provinces on local service. The monopoly was granted to allow them to create the infrastructure, even to places where it would probably not pay off.

They still are a terrible company to deal with and the internet service offering is really not that good in Canada.

I can find no link or detail or reference to what exactly is the CRTC's decision.

From a few mentions in the text, I suspect it is related to making broadband internet access an essential service that should be available to all canadians. Right now, many not so remote communities don't have broadband internet access and the situation is stagnating.

To be perfectly honest, Canada has is a worst case scenario for providing broadband to everyone. With that in mind, they are actually doing a pretty amazing job. I got 16mbit internet downtown and even my cottage on an island in the middle of a lake in rural ontario has a 4mbit wireless link. It could be a lot worse.

The sector may be anti-competitive but it certainly hasn't stifled innovation, at least not across the board. The province I live in is almost the size of Texas with about 1/24 of Texas' population. Yet we'll have 100% broadband penetration by 2011.

When Bell was a monopoly, they had a phone in every household which you leased from Bell. Monopolies seem to penetrate the market very well, regardless of their level of innovation so I don't think market penetration should be by any means a measure of innovation.

If you're still interested, the "decision" and "framework" that they talk about seems to be "Telecom Decision CRTC 2008-17" ( http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2008/dt2008-17.htm ), in which they decide to institute a new framework for the mostly public telco/cableco to sell internet wholesale to the smaller ISPs.

We'll know it's bad when Canadians start threatening to move to America.

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