If asked, would you agree that a government agency should be able to stick hot pokers in your eyes, how would you answer?
Personally, I am surprised that 1 in 4 Canadians think this is OK. That is how I read the recent survey released by Angus Reid. The survey was portrayed as a poll on Canadians’ views on the CRTC’s usage based billing decision, but it really didn’t do that at all.
After all, it was a survey of members of the Angus Reid online panel – not average Canadians. This panel may have tested fine for political polling, but there should have been some kind of bias expected when asking internet users if they want their rates to go up.
The survey didn’t get the question right either – in fact, the survey didn’t even get the name of Canada’s regulator right, let alone describe the decision correctly. The way the question was phrased, I have to ask what kind of people agreed with a price increase. They are the ones that I suggest would also allow the government to stick hot pokers in people’s eyes.
Hopefully Angus Reid did this work on a pro bono basis. Besides helping to grab headlines, “free” is more than this study was worth.
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I’ll agree the question is pretty pointless in terms of setting public policy. It doesn’t capture the real issues behind the outrage.
If the Angus Reid question had been “Do you agree that light users of the internet should subsidize heavy users?” you would get a similar skew in results. It asks for a moral judgment that ignores the context of wholesale vs retail pricing, for a start. And what’s light? What’s heavy? What exactly do they mean by subsidize?
Yet that’s exactly how the CRTC framed its underlying premise in consultation 2011-77: that “ordinary consumers served by Small ISPs should not have to fund the bandwidth used by the heaviest retail Internet service consumers.”
Both of them are leading people towards a desired result and neither of them captures the true scope of the rulings that kicked off this whole mess.