Usage Based Billing In Canada To Be Rescinded 364
theshowmecanuck writes "The Prime Minister of Canada and the Minister of Industry are set to reverse a ruling by the CRTC (Canadian Radio and Television Commission) allowing big Cable and Telecom companies to charge based on bandwidth usage. The ruling applied to both retail customers and smaller ISPs buying bandwidth wholesale from the major companies. The head of the CRTC has been called to testify before cabinet on why they want to allow the big internet providers to do this. In this case the elected government agrees with the very large number of angry Canadians that this was bad for competition. Most Canadians see this as a bureaucracy aided cash grab with very suspect timing since companies like Netflix are starting to move into the Canadian market (big cable companies lowered caps and increased usage fees a week before Netflix started Canadian operations). The CRTC has a fair number of ex-industry executives on the board."
Balance as usual. (Score:5, Insightful)
The CRTC has a fair number of ex-industry executives on the board.
Apparently none were ex-Netflix.
Not yet a victory (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Right on! (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking as someone who moderates a lot, your preemptive claim of moderator abuse doesn't help get the moderators to leave you alone. :P
As for the cap, the caps aren't like that. What actually happened is that your new cap is 25GB, and it costs $2/GB beyond that. Still think its a great idea to watch hulu or download a 10GB game off Steam? Those are the actual numbers the ISPs in Canada are pushing on people.
The other issue is that this came from the CRTC, which is notoriously stuffed with former telecom insiders and who ALWAYS rules in their favor (except when they clash with the big media companies, but Canadians never win in these things).
This decision was terrible and the government is doing the right thing by stepping in. What they actually need to do is purge the CRTC and fill it with true experts instead of former Bell employees, but I'll take any kind of forward progress at this point.
Re:The situation is much more complicated than tha (Score:5, Insightful)
On the consumer side, you can pick an appropriate plan that allows for only the amount of bandwidth that you need, resulting in more effective market segregation. This means low-use consumers don't need to subsidize high-use consumers. On the ISP side, the incentive is to provide as fast a connection as possible to encourage usage and excess usage.
What actually does happen, though, is that the ISP provides ludicrous plans (too much money, too little bandwidth) AND the ISP does everything in their power to encourage excess usage. They have their cake and eat it, too, because we lack proper, level playing-field competition.
Re:best interests (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Right on! (Score:4, Insightful)
And as is regularly brought up, there's a reason for that. Without government sponsored monopolies most cities would have 50 ISPs jumping over themselves for the lucrative to operate and relatively cheap to install urban markets, while the unprofitable to operate, relatively expensive to install outlying areas would be luck to get Internet at all. The whole idea of local government owned or government managed utilities came about precisely because people outside of the urban centers got tired of not being able to get electricity, water, and phone service. Do you think the Internet would be miraculously different somehow?
Re:Right on! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd rather have pot holes and falling bridges than a road system owned by shipping companies who set-up tolls and send their own cops after those who might carry anything too big in their trunk.
Re:Right on! (Score:5, Insightful)
Then run it as a god forsaken utility! First and foremost, there are plenty of rural areas stuck with zero broadband options. No cable, no DSL, no 3G coverage.
Secondly, utilities are highly, highly regulated. If the power company wants to increase your bill by $.02 per kWh, they have to go and ask the government's permission to do so.
They generally don't even own the distribution lines, they have to bid to offer services and the lowest bidder gets access. Imagine a world where the costs of starting an ISP exactly equal to the costs of installing a trunk line to your basement and the servers and software needed to operate. And unlike electricity or natural gas, there's no reason that the distribution lines couldn't be shared by multiple ISPs. Now, can you even begin to imagine how such a system would change the way ISPs operate?
I say hell yes, treat them exactly like a utility. The current system gets all of the public costs associated with utilities and practically none of the benefits.
Re:An outbreak of sense (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not really an outbreak of sense-- if you RTFA the big providers will still have caps, and those caps are too low to support things like netflix. My GF lives in canada and goes over the cap (with Videotron) periodically just from normal use, without watching HD movies or anything. When I finally got around to getting an HD TV I went through 15GB in a few days watching netflix, but I don't have a cap (at least officially). She'd be getting overage bills if she did anything like that-- we were a bit disappointed that when Netflix decided to offer service in Canada it was only online, since the bandwidth caps make it so it's not terribly useful.
With any luck, the small providers will be able to push the big ones into no caps or high enough caps to be useful, but it doesn't look like there will be an immediate effect.
Re:An outbreak of sense (Score:4, Insightful)