Is it time to review Canada’s net neutrality framework?

Last month, in “Net neutrality 20 years later”, I wrote “Canada’s policy framework for net neutrality is among the most prescriptive and restrictive.”

That led me to wonder: Is it time for that framework to be reviewed?

After all, the United States has operated without such regulations for more than half a decade and the sky has not fallen.

The UK regulator, Ofcom, has been reviewing submissions to its recent consultation on the subject, seeking a more nuanced approach. In its call for comments, the regulator observed:

because the net neutrality rules constrain the activities of the ISPs, they may be seen as restricting their ability to innovate, develop new services and manage their networks. This could lead to poor consumer outcomes, including consumers not benefiting from new services as quickly as they should, or at all. These potential downsides might become more pronounced in the future, as people’s use of online services expands, traffic increases, and more demands are placed on networks.

As Ofcom has noted, as technology evolves and we continue to move even more activities online, it is important for net neutrality regulations “to support innovation, investment and growth, by both content providers and ISPs. Getting this balance right will improve consumers’ experiences online, including through innovative new services and increased choice.”

I noted last fall that Ofcom was proposing:

• most zero-rating offers will be allowed;
• ISPs have flexibility to offer retail packages with different levels of quality;
• ISPs can use traffic management measures to manage networks;
• ISPs have more scope to develop specialised services, such as network slicing;
• Ofcom will not prioritise enforcement action where there is clear public benefit, in relation to:
  • the prioritisation and zero-rating of all communications with the emergency services;
  • traffic management of internet services provided on transport;
  • the use of parental controls and other content filters involving the blocking of traffic; and
  • blocking access to fraudulent or scam content.

Last week, I thought it was interesting that the CRTC itself chose a more nuanced approach to zero-rating in its determinations in TRP CRTC 2023-41: Mobile wireless service plans that meet the needs of Canadians with various disabilities. In that policy determination, the question of permitting (and even mandating) zero-rating was at issue for Video Relay Service (VRS). The CRTC found that “zero-rating VRS clearly benefits the public interest, with minimal associated harm, and would be consistent with the DPP (Differential Pricing Practices) framework”. Still, the CRTC did not consider it to be necessary to mandate zero-rating of VRS by all of the service providers, finding that consumers have access to competitive choice of providers that offer zero-rated VRS services and other suitable solutions.

Competitive choice, freedom to innovate and develop new services. Those might be clues that the CRTC should reassess its overly prescriptive approach to net neutrality.

Last week also saw President Biden renominate (for the third time) long-time net neutrality advocate Gigi Sohn to fill a seat on the Federal Communications Commission that has been open for 2 years. David McGarry writes “Should she gain the Senate’s approval, she will break the agency’s current 2–2 Democrat-Republican logjam and allow the agency to re-enact Obama-era net neutrality regulations, which are economically nonsensical and largely unnecessary.”

According to McGarry, “Mandated net neutrality was the worst sort of technocratic overreach. Bureaucrats dreamed up an overbroad market intervention to ameliorate an imagined crisis—to the detriment of innovation and consumers.”

In 2017, Ken Engelhart wrote about the natural experiment created when the the US got rid of its net neutrality regulations under previous FCC Chair Ajit Pai while Canada established its framework.

When Canada banned zero-rating, the United States didn’t. As a result, T-Mobile, an American cellphone company, started zero-rating video services. The other wireless carriers in the U.S. retaliated with unlimited data offers. Now, the U.S. has unlimited wireless offers and Canada doesn’t. Can I say definitively that this is a permanent difference or that it can be attributed to our zero-rating rules? No, but it is the kind of anti-consumer impact that happens when regulators regulate too much.

Two years later, he followed up saying, “You might have expected that as a result two very different internets would develop in the two countries.”

Of course, that didn’t happen. He noted that the US and Canada have similar internet services, with similar average speeds. Indeed, fixed broadband speeds in the US are now about 35% higher than Canada. The sky didn’t fall as predicted by US Senate Democrats.

As Engelhart wrote, “In the end, it seems that public interest groups and regulators were selling the public elephant repellant: a harmless, but useless spray, meant to defend against a threat that does not exist.”

In his 2017 primer on net neutrality, Professor Daniel Lyons wrote, “A small delay in packet delivery may be imperceptible to someone browsing the web but can erode the quality of a video stream or a telemedicine app. Prioritizing these packets could improve the experience for Netflix users or rural doctors, without adversely affecting users of congestion-insensitive services.”

I’ll give Professor Lyons the final word. “More generally, net neutrality discourages innovation by broadband providers. It assumes that the way broadband is currently delivered is the way it must always be, which limits providers’ ability to test new business models.”

Isn’t it time to review Canada’s net neutrality framework?