Canada's Failure To Actually Enforce Its Net Neutrality Rules Shows Why Focusing On Regulation Is Missing The Point
from the competition-is-the-thing dept
For many, many years we've pointed out that the debate over "network neutrality" in the US was a red herring. The discussions around net neutrality are really just a symptom of the real problem: that we lack true competition in the broadband market. Furthermore, we've noted that any attempt to put in place net neutrality regulations would likely be a failure, because of the lobbying clout of the likes of AT&T and others. The end result would be incredibly favorable to the telcos, not to the public and, in fact, we've seen glimpses of that happening already.Adding another datapoint (or, several) to this debate is Michael Geist, who got access to information about how Canadian regulators enforced that country's net neutrality rules and discovered that regulators there basically don't enforce a damn thing. They more or less let the telcos do what they want.
Although the CRTC has not publicly disclosed details on net neutrality complaints and the resulting investigations, I recently filed an Access to Information request to learn more about what has been taking place behind the scenes. A review of hundreds of pages of documents discloses that virtually all major Canadian ISPs have been the target of complaints, but there have been few, if any, consequences arising from the complaints process. In fact, the CRTC has frequently dismissed complaints as being outside of the scope of the policy, lacking in evidence, or sided with Internet provider practices. Rogers Communications has been the target of nearly half of all cases opened in response to net neutrality complaints. In recent months, there have been multiple complaints arising from bandwidth throttling of World of Warcraft, a popular multi-player online game. Rogers initially denied any wrongdoing, only to later acknowledge that there was a problem. The company promised to address the issue, though no consequences arose and it was not forced to publicly disclose the issue.Once again, the problem is not with net neutrality, but with a lack of competition. If you had real competition, people would choose to go with more neutral providers, forcing the market to follow. It's the lack of competition that lets telcos push for less than neutral solutions, and it's the regulatory capture that makes any attempt to legislate neutrality next to useless.
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Filed Under: canada, competition, enforcement, net neutrality, regulation
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Competition doesn't just mean more than one company
So, in spite of what Mike says about regulation, regulation is important. One way we can use it to spur competition is to prohibit anti-competitive behavior, such as requiring long term contracts, especially ones with punitive Early Termination Fees. We should do that for both cell phone companies *and* cable companies. And enforce unbundling rules for hardware and services.
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Re: Competition doesn't just mean more than one company
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Re: Re: Competition doesn't just mean more than one company
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Non enforcement
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So... You're against "net neutrality" on grounds that it isn't enforced.
You have no consistent position. Just two pieces away you write: "if dinosaur media organizations want to merge, let them". -- Yet here you complain there's no competition!
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Re: So... You're against "net neutrality" on grounds that it isn't enforced.
The question that needs to be asked is how to make competition greater in the US.
Some would say it's the abolishment of the FCC. I don't think that's necessarily the case. You would still have to go to Congress for a lot of rules to be codified, and judging from the domain seizures this would not give great results since AT&T lobbies heavily to Congress to keep the status quo.
The best way to promote is possibly some upstart undercutting AT&T profits. The question is, when does that upstart come and change everything?
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Re: Re: So... You're against "net neutrality" on grounds that it isn't enforced.
Why have these rules to begin with? They're only intended to serve corporate interests at public expense, and that's all they pretty much rules. Just remove many of the rules and let people broadcast as they please. We can keep one emergency broadcasting frequency for government to broadcast emergencies, but that's it.
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Re: Re: Re: So... You're against "net neutrality" on grounds that it isn't enforced.
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Re: Re: Re: So... You're against "net neutrality" on grounds that it isn't enforced.
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Re: So... You're against "net neutrality" on grounds that it isn't enforced.
With the telcos, there is very little (often no) competition so people have no option to switch providers if they don't like the policies of Rogers.
How can you not see the difference here?
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Re: So... You're against
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The concept of telecommunications
More in http://rmf.vc/BroadBandInternet?x=td or, if you want to go far deeper, http://rmf.vc/InformationVsTelecom&x=td.
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Re: The concept of telecommunications
At the heart of the lack of competition, is the history of governments granting 'special monopolies'. This was probably the only viable way to create the far-reaching telecommunications infrastructure we now enjoy, but the deals should have been structured differently. For example, Bell, should have had a time limit on network ownership, after which time the ownership passed on to the government. There still would have been LOTS of money to be made both before and after the transfer of ownership, but we wouldn't now be in the position of paying through the nose for infrastructure we've already paid for. Also, government ownership of the infrastructure would ensure lots of competition - anyone with a viable business plan and a few dollars could start an ISP business, and there would be no question of UBB, throttling, or other such cash-grab anti-competitve ploys on the part of those in charge of the infrastructure.
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Net neutrality is not about the legislation but about the will of the people to change something, it doesn't really matter what the law says if the culture behind is sane and healthy which in the case of the USA it is not and yes trying to pass legislation against the big guns is an uphill battle but without that fight, without that struggle there will be no competition in the USA anytime soon.
Also the only thing that could happen is the big boys getting more of the same and not really changing anything.
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nothing new
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circles
There are a group of gangs in your neighborhood that are running wild, causing mayhem and extorting money from the community. The gangs are the big Telco's in this example.
These gangs have infiltrated the local cops and by way of bribe and/or coercion have persuaded the cops to leave the gangs alone or only make token arrests with no meaningful punishment. The cops are the CRTC (or FCC in 'Merica).
And your solution is to ... get rid of the cops and/or undo the laws the gangs are violating.
WHAT?!?!?
I'm am SO sick of hearing this "free market will sort itself out" argument. The guys who have caused and continue to cause the problems are suddenly just going to start doing the "right thing" if we just let them alone to do what they want? Hardly.
Just because whatever agency has been less than vigilant in reigning in the abuse these giant corps dish out is NO REASON to remove the regulators/regulations. It WILL NOT WORK. They always have acted and always will act solely in their own best interest, public be damned. There's no magical "market force" that will stop them.
Free markets are driven by profit. Profit can be equated to growth. And growth will invariably lead to monopolies.
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Re: circles
There's a lot of problems with the system, and it's mainly from how there is little accountability to what the people want.
The regulators are making a problem worse. This is with the patent market, the copyright market, and broadband in general.
We don't need monopolies. We need to find ways to force the stagnant market to compete again.
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Re: Re: circles
Not at all. I don't even know how you could infer that from what I said.
Yes the corruption needs to be addressed. But we need to focus on those who are causing the corruption. Those who are corrupted are also complicit, but if we just remove any kind of restrictions we're only rewarding and encouraging those who are the cause of the problem.
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Re: Re: Re: circles
Mike's (and Jay's) argument is that if there were multiple providers then people could just switch to the one they liked best, forcing the Rogers/Bells/Comcasts of the world to change the way they treat people.
The "regulation method" is ineffective, discourages growth, expensive (who pays the regulator), and has high risk of corruption (easier to pay off the regulator than to change).
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Re: Re: Re: Re: circles
What I am saying is that our "free markets" lead to monopolies and that we must regulate them in order to prevent this. We don't regulate them enough and look what they're doing. And somehow the answer is to stop regulating them?!? Really?
Yea. Sure thing. They're already doing lots of bad stuff. Let's just remove all restrictions - I'm sure they'll behave.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: circles
The "regulation method" is ineffective, discourages growth...
You say this as if it's a bad thing, but the fact of the matter is that discouraging growth should be exactly what regulation does. It's not, it wasn't designed to, but it should.
Our economy depends on growth, and the myth that growth is infinite. The fact, however, is that it's not. It can not be. There is no such thing as an infinite resource, and an economy is just an abstract representation of resources. Oil (which has in effect taken the place of gold as the backbone of the economy) is definitely not infinite. Not land. Not water. NOTHING.
Sure, there are resources that are sustainable. Land for farming is an example. Compost, rotate, etc and you can keep using that land forever. The problem is that as growth continues the land has be used harder (less time to restore the nutrients) and can no longer be sustained. You can open up more land to farm, but at some point you ARE going to run out.
Air (and to extent water) seem to be infinite, but in reality are not. The industry growth that you're so fond of can, will, and is poisoning them both and making them unusable.
Yes, by all means. Let's continuing growing so that we can keep and expand our luxurious lifestyles. Let's just keep pushing it, keep selling the idea of growth and that everyone can be rich if they just try hard enough, until everything is used up and there's NOTHING left.
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Re: circles
What we have now, and have had for many decades, (if not for a century or more), is corporatism, along with its attendant lobbying and back-room deals. Corporations would like you to believe that they represent a 'free market'; this belief hides the fact that corporatists are actually collectivists, rather than the individualists that they claim to be.
A free market may or may not solve a lot of the problems that are discussed on Techdirt - we'll never know until we try. BTW, there's no fundamental conflict between a free market and a certain level of government regulation, in spite of what the corporations would have us believe.
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Re: Re: circles
I think you're right that we don't have a truly free market, that we haven't had one in a while, and that what we have now is corporatism.
Where I think we may differ, however, is how we got here. You say that it's been decades or more since we had a free market, so the implied assertion is that we did at one time. So, how did we get from there to here? My opinion is that a free market will cause what we're seeing today. I think monopolies were being created and that people realized what a Bad Thing this would be so they tried to regulate to prevent it. However, the corporations were able to infiltrate and corrupt the regulation process.
I just don't think there's any way to avoid this happening if you allow a free market to run loose. They are always going to head toward monopolies and will always gain the power/influence to subvert the system.
In the end, I think we really DO know what a free market will do.
cheers
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Re: Re: Re: circles
This brings me to the legal concept of a corporation as a person. If we could do away with this bit of legerdemain, and fix all the laws that accord individul rights to corporate collectives which have no real locus of accountability, we could go a long way toward bringing corporations to heel. And I believe that all of this, in turn, hinges on electoral reform - we need to return to government 'by the people, for the people', and that means major restrictions on how much money, and whose money, can be spent on election campaigns. As it is, North America is ruled by corporations, and elections are the modern-day equivalent of 'bread and circuses'.
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Buy some Neutrality
During high capacity times at home (evenings for example), the option to ride above the crowd makes sense to me. IT'S NICE TO HAVE AN OPTION.
Interestingly they've done something similar on a local highway, which has a pay-for-access fast lane who's price actually changes by the level of congestion you avoid (and no speed limit when you're on it). The price ranges from $1.50 to $8.00 during peak times, where it can save you an hour in avoided traffic.
Assuming bandwidth is not an unlimited resource, I'm willing to pay a little extra when I feel what I'm doing is important enough to warrant it.
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So instead, we have a system where independent ISPs basically just resell bandwidth that they buy from the telcos and cable companies, using the cables that already exist. This gives the telcos and cable companies a lot of power to limit any new competition either by pricing this bandwidth ridiculously high, or by shaping the traffic flowing upstream from the independent, which affects the service the independent can offer to their customers.
Without some form of regulation, if the telcos and cable companies decide they want to traffic shape, then there's nothing the independents can do about it. No new competitor can just pop up and start offering non-shaped access. It's a situation where we need regulation in order to promote competition.
The CRTC complaint system sucks for two reasons. First, it doesn't prohibit traffic shaping, it just says the ISPs have to disclose that they do it. So the solution to many complaints is "Oh, there was inadequate disclosure. The ISp doesn't have to stop doing it, they just have to be better at disclosing it".
Secondly, it puts the burden of filing complaints on the consumer, then requires them to provide evidence. The average consumer isn't capable of obtaining and providing evidence sufficient to satisfy the CRTC. So you see complaints which consist of nothing more than "My internet access is slow", which the CRTC dismisses for lack of evidence.
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I really wish they would wake up to the fact that over 3/4 of the US has one or MAYBE 2 choices when it comes to broadband...maybe then they would see a problem with how the big incumbent providers behave towards their own customers. (with contempt and huge rate increases on a regular basis!)
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