Feds overrule CRTC, allow big telcom to squish VOIP upstarts

Canada.com reported in Paul Kedrosky's Infections Greed

OTTAWA - The federal government trumped the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission on Wednesday, removing price restrictions on telephone companies that allow people to make phone calls over the Internet.
The highly unusual move is the first time the federal government has overruled a decision by the independent telephone regulator in more than a decade.
The move will allow big incumbent telephone companies to cut their VoIP prices drastically, undermining pricing initiatives offered by smaller companies such as Vonage and Primus Canada.

Short version: Bell Canada and Telus Corp will be allowed to slut themselves out on the price of their VOIP services, potentially squeezing the little startup companies (who brought VOIP to market in the first place), so that the big, fat, lazy telcos can go back the status quo of locking up their markets and being unhelpful to their customers.

I'm no commie, and I'm a big fan of the free market (if one really existed), but as long as some companies can't be trusted to do good works, some level of government regulation is required. But government intervention that shores up poor business plans is never the answer. Naturally, it's too much work for Bell Canada and Telus to get better, so they need to have the threats to their business legislated away.

It's a pity, just as I had lauded the CRTC for finally doing something intelligent, the Tories had to go and muck it up. Between this, their ham-handed bungling (not to mention bald-faced lying) on the Income Trust issue, it's clear that the Tories are damned and determined to fumble the next election at any cost.

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CRTC tells big telcoms the score on VOIP

again from the fine people at MarketNews

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has
asserted its previous
decision on VoIP services that regulates it just as a local telephone
service, essentially preventing incumbent telephone companies from pricing their
service lower than competing VoIP companies. However, the Commission said it
will reconsider the established threshold of 25 per cent market share that
incumbent local exchange telephone companies must lose in order to qualify for
regulatory forbearance.

It pleases me enormously to see the CRTC, a governing body that I have railed against for years doing something to justify their existence: encouraging the telcos to adapt to a new player on the block, and not get away with rubbing out the competition and going back to business as usual. Admittedly, the ruling comes with a large "but" attached to it. Frankly, the telcos need take a look at their outdated pricing models for their services and look for better ways to offer value to customers rather than seek legislation protecting their way of doing business.

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