UBB, CRTC, and Other Headache-Inducing Acronyms

The fight for Canada's digital future is underway, as advocacy groups take on Bell, Rogers, and Shaw over usage-based billing.

The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission is holding hearings this week into usage-based billing, a practice used by Bell to charge smaller internet service providers for how much bandwidth they use. Mark Coatsworth, an owner of a tech start-up from Toronto, recounts his testimony before the CRTC for Torontoist, and his version of events highlights just how the telecom sector has managed to score so many policy victories. “Bell Canada has an army of lawyers and policymakers whose only purpose is to deal with internet regulations and government policy,” writes Coatsworth. “These people make a full-time job of studying, researching, and proposing rulings to advance corporate profit margins.” Anyone interested in preserving equitable access to the internet should thank selfless advocates like Coatsworth or the Open Media guys who made this hearing possible in the first place. Without them, Bell, Rogers, and the like would steamroll their way through the CRTC.

The Globe and Mail's editorialists nail the dilemma over UBB on the head, calling it “an inevitable result of praiseworthy but conflicting objectives – preserving competition, while allowing the main providers that built most of the infrastructure to realize a return.” Bell and Rogers, of course, are fully entitled to spend their way to favourable policy decisions (it's not like they can't afford it – Canada's cable companies reported a 10-per-cent growth in revenue last year). So The Globe rightly pins part of the blame on the federal government, which “punted this ball, and now needs to retrieve it.” Letting multibillion-dollar enterprises run roughshod over the nation's regulatory framework is an act of negligence, but there's hope that the Tories' much-anticipated digital economy strategy will open up the telecom sector to foreign competition. It's about time.

And Canadian Business' Peter Nowak looks at what might happen if “the CRTC loses its collective mind” and decides that “over-the-top,” or OTT, services, such as Netflix, iTunes, and YouTube, need regulation and Canadian content standards. Nowak fears the regulation-hungry commission might just think these applications need a certain amount of Canadiana to be allowed to proliferate here. Netflix ought to be able to easily make the transition (merely “stock up on old episodes of Beachcombers and The Friendly Giant”), but for YouTube, which has yet to become profitable, the unlikely could spell disaster. The money Google would have to spend to adhere to Cancon standards wouldn't be much, but if every other country decides it needs its cultural industries protected on the channel, YouTube's “already questionable climb to profitability would slow down considerably.” While this is all hypothetical, the fact that the CRTC has the power to potentially do something like regulate Canadians' access to YouTube is indeed frightening.