In the wake of Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s speech at the Conference Board of Canada event yesterday, I am just getting around to posting some thoughts about some of the submissions to the Competition Policy Review Panel.

I was somewhat intrigued to see that the CRTC submitted a paper with 5 recommendations, starting off with one that sought to replace the Broadcast Act and Telecom Act, with a new converged Communications Act:

There should be a single Act governing broadcasting, telecommunications and radiocommunication.

The CRTC added 4 more recommendations: streamlining regulations while moving to ex-post regulation but first ensuring the Commission has powers to impose monetary penalties; move spectrum licensing for telecom away from Industry Canada [a recommendation I endorsed last month]; a merger review process with clear and distinct roles for the CRTC and Competition Bureau; maintaining foreign ownership restrictions for both content providers and carriers.

I found it to be particularly interesting that the Commission intervened in the consultation, rather than waiting to simply administer whatever rules are set forth by the government on the other side of the river.

A lively discussion could arise from at least one part of the submission:

The economics of Internet production do not favour local content. As localism is eroded, the maintenance of Canadian capacity in the form of Canadian-owned and –controlled companies will become more critical. A branch plant economy for cultural production and distribution is difficult to envisage. Multi-national enterprises would have little incentive to create uniquely national content.

There is a lot of material in this little paragraph. I wonder if this could be an exercise for my grad students this weekend. Hmmm.

We’ll see if these points attract debate later this year; the CRTC’s workplan calls for hearings in 2008 on the impacts of New Media on the Broadcasting and Telecommunications system.

2008-6) on delegation of investigation of telemarketing complaints.

In a nutshell, everyone who makes telemarketing calls, and their clients (the companies that hire telemarketers to make calls on their behalf) will need to register with a new agency. The CRTC explicitly rejected a call to exempt the registration of those making calls that are exempt from the Do Not Call registry.

One might have thought that clubs would be exempt because they are calling people with whom a business relationship exists. Every girl scout that calls to sell cookies, every school kid that calls to sell you tickets, every club member that calls to tell you about their car wash – everyone of these people is a telemarketer under the CRTC’s definition. Even if they only call families within the school, if there is money involved in the call, it is telemarketing.

If the kids call from their home phone, that phone better be registered. Our kids are telemarketers. The client is their club. Each kid as well as the club will have to register and pay $100. And parents, you better make sure that the club has registered because your phone line is now being used for telemarketing purposes. By the way, mom and dad, you have to keep a copy of club’s registration – and proof of their fees paid – for 3 years in case of an audit.

Back in September, I wrote that I thought the Section 41.7(1) of Telecom Act specifically exempts the following classes of callers from any database registry: calls made when an business relationship exists, calls from a registered charity, newspaper, political party, etc. The CRTC’s response was that all 9 of the parties that pointed out the conflict in 41.7(1) were mistaken. The CRTC said that Section 41.2 lets it administer databases (beyond the DNCL), although mysteriously, the exemption from any databases doesn’t seem to apply.

There were some suggestions that all of the costs should be paid by the telecom services providers. After all, they are the biggest beneficiaries of telemarketing. The phone companies tried to get compensated for helping with the investigations – the CRTC said no to that; it is a cost of doing business.

Here is how this decision chases jobs out of Canada. The CRTC has established new rules:

A telemarketer shall not initiate a telemarketing telecommunication on its own behalf unless it has registered with, and provided information to, the National DNCL operator and has paid all applicable fees charged by the Complaints Investigator delegate.

A telemarketer shall not initiate a telemarketing telecommunication on behalf of a client unless that client has registered with, and provided information to, the National DNCL operator and the applicable fees charged by the Complaints Investigator delegate associated with that client have been paid.

The CRTC can only enforce its rules in Canada. So, let’s say a lawn care company hires a US or overseas telemarketing company that completely ignores the Do Not Call List. The CRTC can’t go after the telemarketing company – how would they press charges outside Canada? The Commission forgot to add a rule explicitly requiring clients of telemarketers to register.

Those pesky lawn care companies or duct cleaners don’t need to register – the CRTC requires the telemarketer to ensure that its client has registered. But the telemarketer is out of the country; why would they care? What is the Commission going to do?

Will the CRTC fix the holes in its decision that tries to make all of us who volunteer to make a few calls for schools and clubs pay $100 annual registration fees?

Who thought the gun registry was out of control?

I was recently pointed to a speech last month by New York governor Eliot Spitzer to the New York State Farm Bureau Annual Meeting in Niagara Falls, where he launched a campaign for universal broadband service for all of NY.

When many of us think of NY, we think of one of the most densely populated parts of the planet. We think of advanced communications driving Wall Street, forgetting that there is a lot of territory upstate.

A drive from Buffalo to Albany can look similar to driving from Toronto to Sudbury – albeit with way fewer Tim Horton’s locations and no Canadian Tire stores.

Governor Spitzer said that his state has inadequate infrastructure for the Information Age.

In fact, fewer than 25 percent of New Yorkers in rural areas have access to broadband Internet. Some may assume that because these areas are rural, they have natural and unavoidable disadvantages. But a rural landscape has not stopped Canada, a mostly rural country, from maintaining a broadband penetration rate of over 50 percent.

This problem does not only affect Upstate. Downstate doesn’t fare much better. Nearly two-thirds of people living in New York City lack access to affordable, high-speed broadband.

He blames the US federal government for a lack of leadership – the absence of a national broadband strategy.

So the governor has set his own objectives:

Our goals are—by the year 2015—for every citizen of New York to have access to at least 20 megabits per second in each direction, and 100 megabits per second in major metropolitan areas.

Despite Canada being cited as ahead of New York, will broadband be an issue in Canadian politics? How will we ensure that in 2015, Canada will still be seen as a leader by our neighbours?

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Eliot Spitzer, broadband

Apparently, some people with Rogers.com email addresses are not getting their mail. There has been a server outage since last night which results in mail getting bounced back to the sender.

Unfortunately, the mail isn’t getting queued for later delivery, which is the normal situation.

Instead, senders are receiving:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

username@rogers.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 16): 554 delivery error: dd This user doesn’t have a rogers.com account (username@rogers.com)

This is actually a serious problem. When bounce-backs like this are received, this kind of message results in people being dropped from subscriptions to any newsletters that they subscribe to.

I was told about this by a Rogers customer who called technical support and reached Jason, who knew about the trouble and said there was nothing he could about it. When the customer suggested that he should at least put an announcement about the trouble onto the ‘on-hold’ message, so that people don’t have to wait listening to music for 11 minutes, he said that he couldn’t do that.

The customer asked him to have his manager look into it. Jason said that he doesn’t have a manager.

Attention Rogers: you have someone answering your technical support lines who has no manager. Sounds like a coup took place without notifying the stock markets.

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Rogers, email

In the Policy Direction issued to the CRTC in December 2006, the Commission was told that when regulating on a non-economic basis, to the greatest extent possible to use measures that are symmetric and competitively neutral.

Last July, the CRTC set out an action plan to comply with the Policy Direction. At that time, the Commission said that certain social regulatory measures, such as privacy safeguards, quality of service standards and rebates plan and a Consumer Bill of Rights would be prioritized following the establishment of the telecommunications consumer agency.

Well, the CCTS now exists and that means it is show-time for the CRTC to review its social and other non-economic regulatory measures for compliance with the Policy Direction.

Public Notice 2008-1 sets out the timetable for this review, with paper being exchanged through the month of February and an action plan to be developed and issued by the CRTC before the end of April. The objective of the exercise seems to be to determine which measures will be reviewed in 2008/2009 versus getting pushed out by a year to 2009/2010.

Technorati Tags:
CRTC, social regulation, Policy Direction