Yak had a witness at the CRTC’s Essential Services proceeding this morning. He was asked if there was evidence of the impact of dial around in disciplining telco long distance rates.
I have access to virtually unlimited North American calling on various lines in the house. However, anyone who makes any amount of international calling is crazy if they don’t use a dial-around service. For international calling, all service providers are on an equal footing – even the major phone companies are just resellers of international long distance.
So why are dial around companies so much cheaper?
As I have pointed out before, in many cases, dial around is even cheaper than Skype. No prepayment. No need to run out to a convenience store to buy a card. No expiration date. No ‘system access fee’. You just pick up the phone and dial and the charge appears on your bill.
Some people may only make one call per month, if that. But the savings can be dramatic. Dial around provides an important level of flexibility for people swayed to lock into domestic services bundles.
Will the CRTC keeps casual calling viable? In a country like Canada that has such a high percentage of people making occasional international calls, dial around provides affordable choice.
The problem with the “Information Highway” metaphor for the internet is that people seem to think that highways are the right way – in fact, the only way – to move all goods and people.
In fact, we have an inter-modal transportation system, including rail and highways on land, shipping by sea and air. Some parts regulated as common carrier. Some unregulated. Some scheduled with public access. Some private.
It seems to me that the entire transportation system, including the way disparate systems – transportation networks – integrate could be a better model to examine for policies on how we move information.
Sometimes shipping by sea makes sense. Other times shipping by air is needed. There aren’t rules that mandate that all goods and people must travel equally. So we need to carefully examine why our bits should be any different.
The Green Party of Canada’s election platform includes a section called “Supporting the free flow of information” found on page 153 of its 156 page party platform document.
Its position seems to reflect a view that appears to be based on incorrect premises:
The Internet has become an essential tool in knowledge storage and the free flow of information between citizens. It is playing a critical role in democratizing communications and society as a whole. There are corporations that want to control the content of information on the internet and alter the free flow of information by giving preferential treatment to those who pay extra for faster service.
Our Vision
The Green Party of Canada is committed to the original design principle of the internet – network neutrality: the idea that a maximally useful public information network treats all content, sites, and platforms equally, thus allowing the network to carry every form of information and support every kind of application.
Green Solution
Green Party MPs will:
Pass legislation granting the Internet in Canada the status of Common Carrier – prohibiting Internet Service Providers from discriminating due to content while freeing them from liability for content transmitted through their systems.
Whenever I look at the logo for the Green Party of Canada, I think of an old Harry Chapin song called Flowers are Red. The logo of the political party depicts a flower with green petals.
The Green Party strikes me as being willing to look at issues differently. I think such diversity of views can be healthy.
That said, I don’t accept the Green Party premise that a network that treats all content equally is maximally useful. I think that certain applications and certain types of secure or priority information cannot be supported by a network that treats all content, sites, and platforms equally.
Would a ‘democratic’ network limit the ability to fully converge some application specific networks, by prohibiting measures and assurances that protect voice and priority or secure data?
Why limit the degrees of freedom for companies and users to leverage efficiencies that could be offered by network providers? Sometimes, shipping by sea makes more sense. Other times, it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight. So we have priority courier service.
Chapin’s song celebrates the eccentricity of a child’s painting and mourns a teacher’s success in instilling uniformity:
There are so many colors in the rainbow
So many colors in the morning sun
So many colors in the flower and I see every one
Beige, that most neutral of colours, can be pretty boring. We have all seen apartments and homes that celebrate neutrality. For many, those beige walls enable tenants to add the colour themselves – furniture, art – the applications of their choice. But should the government mandate a world where nobody gets to have colour, even if they want to distinguish themselves?
The creativity in internet application development to date has occurred without specific net neutrality laws. Some might say the creativity has happened because of light touch regulation enabling flexible business models to emerge.
For some content and applications, beige may be the right background. My question is whether we should be legislating beige when there are so many colours in the rainbow?
The better approach for party platforms would be to adopt the language – the complete language – of recommendation 6-5 from the Telecom Policy Review Panel report on Net Neutrality.
The Telecommunications Act should be amended to confirm the right of Canadian consumers to access publicly available Internet applications and content of their choice by means of all public telecommunications networks providing access to the Internet. This amendment should
authorize the CRTC to administer and enforce these consumer access rights,
take into account any reasonable technical constraints and efficiency considerations related to providing such access, and
be subject to legal constraints on such access, such as those established in criminal, copyright and broadcasting laws.
This evening’s speech from the throne laid out the priorities of the Conservative government for the next session of parliament.
We noticed the following tidbits of interest to the telecommunications sector in the section of the speech entitled “Providing Effective Economic Leadership for a Prosperous Future.”
As part of ensuring economic security for Canadians, our Government will bring forward a long-term plan of broad-based tax relief for individuals, businesses and families—including following through on its commitment to a further cut to the GST. To complement this, our Government will support Canadian researchers and innovators in developing new ideas and bringing them to the marketplace through Canada’s Science and Technology Strategy. Our Government will improve the protection of cultural and intellectual property rights in Canada, including copyright reform.
Copyright reform could include an examination of downloaded content on the internet, digital rights management tools and potentially the role of ISPs in the enforcement of these rights. Of course, copyright is important to more than just the cultural sector; our software and technology industries are keenly interested in following this debate.
In addition, the speech announced an infrastructure program, the Building Canada Plan, to support long-term growth. While the rest of that section of the speech spoke of support for bricks and mortar type projects, we’ll want to see if communications infrastructure – perhaps in support for extending broadband capabilities to remote regions – is part of the plan.
Finally, we noticed a section in the law and order section of the speech that could have implications for illegal content on the internet and lawful access to customer name and address information:
Our Government will address Canadians directly on the challenge of protecting our free and open society with a statement on national security. The Government will introduce legislation to make sure that Canada has the tools it needs to stop those who would threaten our cities, communities and families…
We’ll watch for further commentary and the response from the opposition leaders over the coming days.
In January, I asked about carriers leading a drive toward green energy and increased environmental consciousness. I am disappointed that the posting apparently wasn’t sufficient for me to merit consideration for even a small share of the Nobel peace prize. Still, I’ll return to environmental issues with today’s post.
I have noticed a variety of initiatives from carriers coming to the fore in recent weeks, including announcements in the past few weeks or so for projects such as TELUS’ greening in Montreal and Edmonton as well as Bell’s new environmentally conscious Montreal HQ building.
Later this month, the Intelligent Waterloo Conference will be hosting a one day session: Intelligent Communities and Broadband: An Alternative to Energy Consumption, taking place on October 25.
Among the sessions, Assistant Deputy Minister Michael Binder will be looking at Moving Information Without Moving People. The abstract says:
Canadians are increasingly embracing the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in their daily lives. This presentation examines the challenges and opportunities faced by policy-makers in building an innovative economy and society. Particular emphasis is placed on the potential of these technologies to support environmental goals.
The conference is hosted by the Intelligent Waterloo Committee, the City of Waterloo, the University of Waterloo, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), Canada’s Technology Triangle and Communitech.
There were very few reply comments submitted last week for the CRTC’s consultation on delegation of its investigative powers for the telemarketing rules.
Only four groups show up on the CRTC’s website as having sent in reply comments.
to attempt to identify, register and charge fees to the hundreds of thousands of companies that engage in telemarketing will be a controversial administrative nightmare rivalling that of the gun registry.
Ottawa can be a little touchy about the subject of large government administered registration databases.
The phone companies comments acknowledge that there are approximately 80,000 registered charities alone, let alone the countless – but soon to be counted, if the CRTC has its way – number of clubs, school groups, church organizations and small businesses that make calls of any kind dealing with selling something or in some way involving money. Not only will these groups need to register once, but the telemarketer registry records will certainly need to be kept up-to-date, providing the “telemarketing police” with contact information of this year’s head of the grade 8 class trip chocolate bar sales campaign.
Maybe when future school trips come to Ottawa, the tours will include a visit to the Unsolicited Telemarketing Rules investigator’s headquarters. Each kid can come home with a souvenir whistle.
Considering the challenge that the local service contribution administrator has in keeping its records up to date, or the CRTC with its international phone licenses, the CMA is likely not far off in its gun registry analogy for an administrative nightmare associated with this broadly defined telemarketer registry database.
CMA’s comments suggests that the rationale for the registration process with an independent investigator appears to be for the CRTC to avoid conducting its own investigations funded by the phone companies through the consolidated revenue fund. That might be a reasonable expectation since the phone companies are the people profiting from the sale of communications services to telemarketers – whether the calls are exempt from the DNCL or not.
CMA is rightly concerned about its members once again being caught in the cross fire. After all, the fact that a telemarketer joins CMA is a sign that it wants to follow the rules. CMA’s members aren’t the concern for most of us – it is the calls from commercial telemarketers who aren’t members of CMA.
Update [October 15, 12:20 pm]
Today’s National Post includes a story about government red tape burying small business. It makes me wonder why associations representing small and independent businesses didn’t weigh in on this CRTC file.
Is the registry going to be consistent with the objective to reduce the paper burden 20% by November, 2008 from Secretary of State responsible for Small Business & Tourism, Diane Ablonczy. “Key departments and agencies must actually start a count of their requirements being placed on businesses.”
