Should the CRTC be Dissolved?
It's a question that has been asked more than a few times, most recently in the wake of the relatively recent CRTC decision to permit large ISPs to throttle Internet traffic, even traffic from smaller ISPs who used their lack of throttling as a competitive distinction in the marketplace. Now that the CRTC is allowing those same large ISPs to remove yet another competitive distinction, by allowing them to almost literally force smaller ISPs to either implement the same usage-based billing that Bell and Rogers use or make prices unacceptably high, calls for the CRTC to be disbanded are being renewed. Unfortunately for both sides of that debate, our problems won't be fixed by simply dissolving the CRTC, or by keeping it.
A major problem with the way the CRTC has been making (and continues to make) decisions has to do with the direction those decisions have been pointed. As the "independent public authority in charge of regulating and supervising Canadian broadcasting and telecommunications" (emphasis mine; from the CRTC home page), it is not entirely outside the realm of reason to expect the CRTC to make decisions that create some form of regulation of the markets they are responsible for. It's only slightly less reasonable to expect that these regulations be designed to protect the best interests of consumers. Unfortunately, the CRTC has actually done neither recently, instead preferring to allow big businesses to have things their way (even at the expense of smaller businesses) and allow market forces to sort out the problems. The problem with market forces is that they don't work very well when you only have a few options and they work even worse when you have no real distinction between available choices. The recent decision to allow usage-based billing for wholesale Internet access is yet another step toward a market saturated with very few indistinguishable Internet access services.
Even with all this, the calls to dissolve the CRTC are misguided. Leaving Canadians without a regulator would require the government to intervene, which is a process that would take at least as long as the existing CRTC processes. As for trust in the regulator, my experience has been that people in general trust the federal government far less than they trust the CRTC (although maybe this is because the CRTC has fewer things to make people angry about) and so any confidence people may still have in the CRTC would not be transferred to the government. What is needed is for the CRTC to be required, by a real law with real and non-symbolic consequences, to both supervise the market and regulate the market in favour of consumers. Then, the entire body of the CRTC needs to be replaced with people who are actually willing to make the decisions that big businesses are begging and pleading the regulator to stay away from. Perhaps that means that most or all of the existing board stay on, or maybe that means the CRTC is suddenly made up of a completely new set of people. Regardless, leaving Canadians without a regulator is not an acceptable solution, but neither is allowing the regulator to act in the anti-consumer manner it currently seems comfortable acting.
Remember to send your MP a letter stating your position and encourage others to do the same. Send a real one, on real paper, even if you type it and print it and sign your name to the bottom. You can find the address for your MP here with just your postal code.
