In case my post from Thursday interested you in examining the more entertaining regulatory decisions, I have another set of three dissenting opinions (in a single order) to share with you for your reading pleasure.

In one of the final Orders of the year 2006, the CRTC authorized Northwestel to withdraw local service from a small town on Baffin Island, presumably because it was too costly. This despite the fact that the costs were underwritten by the contribution subsidy payments.

I am sorry I missed this story when it was fresh last December.

From this day onward, the concept of basic service as a given in Canada and the notion that established phone companies have an obligation to provide such service to Canadians may be gone forever. My reading of the message underlying the majority decision is that access to phone service is only a given if companies are confident it can be provided profitably. In my view, that is not good enough.

A regulatory colleague tipped me to this CRTC Order, in which Stuart Langford’s dissent can be summarized as:

The nearest hospital is 1200 km away and it’s dark all the time up there this time of year. Still, the majority figures there’s no obligation to serve. No wonder Canadians shake their heads over the value of regulation.

Last week, the OECD and National Science Foundation had a one-day workshop in Washington examining “Social and Economic Factors Shaping the Future of the Internet.”

One of the papers, designed to help participants determine a set of priorities, spoke of the internet changing from the inside out and from the outside in:

From the inside, Internet technologies are transitioning from an era of deployment and performance to an era of qualitative evolution where a diverse range of environments enables communication in a variety of forms and situations. …

From the outside in, the Internet is now a critical infrastructure underpinning global economic and social activity in a globalising world. Accelerating technological development in relation to the Internet has tremendous technological, political, social, and cultural ramifications that are difficult or in many cases, impossible to comprehend. … the Internet needs to meet social needs placed upon it, expand opportunities for innovation and economic growth, be robust and secure, and scale to evolving requirements.

I only had a little time to flip through some of the background material while preparing for my lectures at U of T this weekend. There was an interesting paper by Mark Handley entitled Why the Internet only just works expressing concerns that the network is on the threshold of collapse.

There were a number of Canadian participants in last week’s meeting. I’d welcome their reports on the workshops. Any private sector viewpoints as well?

Some people wonder what kind of people read CRTC decisions for fun. Often, the rulings are highly technical or legalistic or filled with econometric terminology.

But every so often, there is a piece that gives such pleasure that you want to come back for more. It is like my golf game. I may only have 1 or 2 holes per round that make me smile, but the intensity is such that I keep going back.

Stuart Langford has distinguished his term as a CRTC Commissioner as being willing to speak his mind. Today’s decision regarding Rogers’ use of poles on New Brunswick highways contains a dissenting opinion by Commissioner Langford that I commend to you.

He pulls no punches and he isn’t afraid to use colourful language to describe the majority determination.

The Majority decision invites a Robin Hood approach to assessing user fees. Taken to its logical conclusion it could result in provincial schemes that take from the rich and give to provincial coffers not as directly as the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest once redistributed wealth, but just as surely. Perhaps a more appropriate analogy would be to the Sheriff of Nottingham rather than Robin of Locksley. Either way, it strikes me as a formula for anything but regulatory fairness.

His conclusion is succinct:

It may be that the amounts the Province attempts to collect from Rogers each year closely approximate the annual damage done by Rogers’ trucks to New Brunswick’s highways and rights-of-way. Unfortunately, New Brunswick has provided no evidence upon which I could reasonably come to that conclusion. Accordingly, I would have granted Rogers’ application to enter on highways controlled by the Province’s Department of Transportation at no charge.

The majority said that the province’s bill of more that $170,000 was reasonable. After all, look at all the money Rogers is making in New Brunswick.