Canada Mirrors U.S. Broadband Policy, Gets Same Crap Results – Letting your wealthiest ISPs run government? Shockingly not a great idea… – dslreports.com
Canada Mirrors U.S. Broadband Policy, Gets Same Crap ResultsLetting your wealthiest ISPs run government? Shockingly not a great idea…01:09PM Monday Feb 22 2010 by Karl Bodetags: competition · coverage · business · Op/Ed · legislation · world · consumers · Bell Sympatico · TekSavvy Solutions Inc.We've often talked about how Canada was actually seeing some significant growth in their broadband sector early on, with users seeing faster speeds at fairly reasonable prices. The country also consistently ranked very high in the global broadband penetration rankings — despite the evil bogeyman known as “geography” — which many here in the states use to justify the United States' broadband failings. Things were going well for Canadian broadband. But then Canada decided to start mirroring United States broadband policy.That would be fine if the United States actually had a broadband policy. The problem has been that for a decade the United States broadband policy consisted of letting the biggest carriers have whatever they wanted taxpayer subsidies with no strings or accountability, fewer price controls, fewer consumer protections, laws banning towns from wiring themselves with broadband, any merger they saw fit, and then just hoping that telecom Utopia magically blossomed from the ashes.Click for full sizeWhile proponents of such policies pretended they were simply trying to unleash a “free market,” the reality was that investors, lobbyists and executives were busily creating uncompetitive monopoly and duopoly markets, where the biggest carriers literally wrote the laws that governed the competitive landscape. While carriers pretended to love the free market and loathe regulation, they were working tirelessly to impose burdensome regulation upon smaller competitors.Unsurprisingly, this resulted in less competition. Less competition unsurprisingly resulted in U.S. consumers seeing some of the slowest speeds and highest prices among most developed nations. It also resulted in the slow but steady death of independent ISPs, who could barely afford to build their own networks, much less navigate the political minefield created by lawmakers leashed by companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.
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