The CRTC has issued a public notice (PN) that proposes eliminating tariff filings for promotional offerings from incumbent telcos.

The PN talks about the CRTC having received and reviewed a large number of applications proposing promotions, approving most of them within 10 days.

As a result, the Commission is asking for comments on:

… forbearing in whole or in part, either conditionally or unconditionally, from the regulation of promotions for residential and business local wireline services.

… criteria that the Commission could use to establish which service offerings would be considered legitimate promotional service offerings, and therefore, forborne from regulation.

… Given that legitimate promotional service offerings are limited in duration, what duration should be considered appropriate? …

Under what circumstances should a new promotion be considered a continuation of a previous promotion, for example, due to such factors as 1) a very short interval of time between the same offering, and 2) minor variations between offerings?

Ultimately, the objective seems to be streamlining regulatory processes. It is yet another step in the process of letting more normalized market forces govern the telecom market.

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The Alberta Government has named Willie Grieve to be the inaugural chair of the Alberta Utilities Commission, effective February 1, 2008.

The AUC is responsible for the distribution and sale of electricity and natural gas in Alberta. The commission will also be responsible for applications regarding new or upgraded electricity transmission lines.

I first met Willie nearly 17 years ago when he was representing the Government of Saskatchewan and I was working for Unitel. For the past 15 years, Willie has been with TELUS. Our paths have crossed continuously – sometimes agreeing and periodically on opposite sides of various issues. But always amicable and respectful.

Most importantly, I recall teaching him how to discretely wave to our kids during CRTC hearings televised on CPAC [Hint: Watch for lawyers and witnesses adjusting the frames of their glasses].

I was surprised by the announcement that Willie is leaving telecom to go for a government job. I thought Willie’s next job would have been playing jazz trumpet.

Statistics Canada is reporting that Saskatchewan has replaced Alberta as Canada’s fastest growing province.

The province has returned to a population of more than a million for the first time in 6 years.

As a provincial government owned agency, Sasktel operates with an interesting mandate from its shareholder. It has built out high speed internet to every community of more than 200 people and it has invested in upgraded digital wireless in communities that are off the beaten track.

I suspect that some of growth is due to what might be called an Alberta halo effect.

Still, the return to population growth has been enabled by the communications infrastructure put in place by Sasktel, which has been a leader in rolling out a consumer quintuple play.

Light Reading reports that AT&T plans to leverage its extensive network reach in order to improve its position competing against content delivery companies like Akamai and Limelight.

According to the article, AT&T plans to add content servers to its internet data centres around the world, providing a sixfold increase in its caching and live streaming capabilities by the end of 2008.

AT&T’s group president of global business services Ron Spears, said:

In very short order, we will have the ability and all of the asset capacity necessary to optimally deliver and host content in the needed formats with the superior quality of service that our customers demand.

Yesterday’s post referred to a paper published by Hal Singer of Criterion Economics. That paper discusses a Quality of Service (QoS) service, purchased by many online video game providers, that could be placed at risk by net neutrality legislation.

For example, Sony produces EverQuest, a three-dimensional, fantasy, massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that requires users to pay a recurring monthly fee. For a time, EverQuest was the most popular MMORPG in the industry. Blizzard Entertainment produces World of Warcraft, another MMORPG set in a fantasy environment. As of September 2006, World of Warcraft had almost 7 million active subscriptions worldwide.
…
To achieve the best possible fantasy environment for their online gaming websites, Sony and Blizzard place their servers in idcs owned by broadband service providers around the world. They simply cannot afford for the players of their games to experience jitter.

Ron Spears is a past keynote presenter at The Canadian Telecom Summit. We will be exploring Net Neutrality from all angles at The 2008 Canadian Telecom Summit in June.

A couple of academic papers that I have recently seen, including a forthcoming paper to be published by Toronto-based telecommunications lawyer Dr. Alexander J. Adeyinka, refer to net neutrality as a variant of Aesop’s Fable of the Dog in the Manger.

A dog looking for a quiet and comfortable place to take a nap jumped into the manger of the ox and lay there on the hay. Some time later the ox, returning hungry from his day’s work, entered his stall and found the dog in his manger. The dog, in a rage because he had been awakened from his nap, stood up and barked and snapped whenever the ox came near his hay. The ox is a patient beast, but finally he protested: ‘Dog, if you wanted to eat my dinner I would have no objection. But you will neither eat it yourself nor let me enjoy it, which strikes me as a very churlish way to act.’

Moral: Some begrudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves.

[Grosset & Dunlap, 2000]

How does this fit the discussions surrounding Net Neutrality?

In economic terminology, a Pareto improvement occurs when one group is made better off without causing another group to be made worse off. Economists argue that Pareto improvements should always be encouraged.

Economists would argue therefore that access tiering would be a Pareto improvement relative to the status quo; there is no economic reason why one group of subscribers should not be permitted to benefit if there is not deterioration in the service provided to others.

Why is it that proponents of network neutrality build their arguments on what might be called an “anti-Pareto principle.” We hear claims that no one should be able to receive faster delivery paid by the supplier of content or applications unless everyone does.

Georgetown University law professor Gregory Sidak argues that the “dog-in-the-manger” response to access tiering – some call it differential pricing – is intended to prevent a purely voluntary transaction from occurring. Dr. Adeyinka also noted that in a paper published this past summer, Hal Singer of Criterion Economics describes such net neutrality as the politics of envy. Net neutrality says: if a website cannot afford certain bells and whistles, then its rivals should not be allowed to acquire such enhancements.

We will be exploring Net Neutrality from all angles at The 2008 Canadian Telecom Summit in June.

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Reference
I’ll provide a link to Alexander Adeyinka’s forthcoming paper, titled “Net Neutrality Law or Dog in the Manger Jurisprudence – Law & Economics of Net Neutrality in Canada“, once it has been published.