Collusion from Canada’s Internet Service Providers?
In the same week, Bell and Rogers have hit the Canadian public hard, imposing limits on how we use the internet.
DSL: Not only has Bell imposed this on their own customers but also on their wholesale resellers, organisations such as Teksavvy, who they have started traffic-shaping, cutting off many of the newest services on the internet.
Cable: Rogers have been traffic shaping for a couple of years now, but this week stated that they will charge overlimit fees.
That both operators act so definitively, so drastically, and within such a short pace of time must get the attention of our government and the CRTC who must act on their responsibility to ensure competition in the marketplace. From an economics standpoint, these simultaneous industry moves look nothing short of collusion.
While it is in industry’s interests to promote high fees and high profits on data delivery, technologies exist to make data delivery very cheap to deliver. Industry has a mindset and investment model for traditional business models. It is in the public’s interests, and society’s to get to low costs.
