Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul Markham
So the Government passed a law to force a private company to change it's pricing policy?
Or did they remove a law that stopped companies from instituting their own pricing policy?
Either way what was the "government (CRTC)" intervention?
The only thing that stops big companies in some way, from ruling things the way they want to is LAWS. Without them the normal people would be even more fucked.
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Paul, my loose understanding of what happened is this. There are companies here that buy and resell Bell's ADSL service, which as mentioned is part and parcel of government funding provided to Bell in years past. Resellers like TekSavvy, Acanac and a few others offer higher download caps and less expensive overages, as well as more consumer friendly options for heavy internet users. They're also popular for normal internet users on price alone.
The way I understand it, because someone like TekSavvy buys thousands of accounts from Bell as a reseller, they're able to pool their cap space together and possibly get a better price on excess bandwidth usage too. They are then able to pass that on. If they have customers who just use e-mail and surf the web on their 200gb cap, leaving 185gb of unused cap, the company can use that excess for their other customers who do want to use it.
Bell lobbied the CRTC to allow them to individually meter each customer, to stop the resellers from being able to take advantage of this situation. As a side result, it also paves the way for all internet companies to charge for bandwidth the same way that cell phones are billed (per minute / per gb).
These new looser regulations would obviously slowly lead to companies milking us even more for something we already pay a lot for, limiting how much we're able to use the internet. This wouldn't just affect the heavy users. How many kids would be told by their parents that the internet is getting shut off at their home because they can't afford another $300 internet bill?