One more letter to the CRTC about UBB

To the CRTC regarding Notice #: 2011-77 – Call for comments – Review of billing practices for wholesale residential high-speed access services File number: 8661-C12-201102350

I vehemently oppose usage-billing billing with regard to accessing the Internet in Canada.

The CRTC has failed Canadians on this issue.

The CRTC's mandate is to regulate telecoms for Canadians. Instead, the CRTC seeks to regulate Canadians for the telecoms.

In many European countries, Internet access is viewed as a human right and is therefore provided for free to citizens.

Canada has some of the worst performance rates among industrialized nations (we don't rate with in the Top 15 in the world on Internet performance), and yet Canadians pay among the highest rates in the world to access the Internet.

The cause is not helped by a regulatory body that should be enforcing fairness and competition in industry taking its marching orders from the very industry it's supposed to regulate.

The cause is also not helped by a regulatory body that doesn't understand the technology it's meant to regulate.

The cause is further harmed by the fact that this regulatory body's chairman doesn't even use the wide-reaching, readily accessible, virtually ubiquitous technology over which he wields so much power.

Light Internet users DO NOT subsidize heavy users.

The Internet IS NOT a utility.

This misinformation -- which would have been weeded out immediately by a truly independent, knowledgeable regulatory body -- threatens to turn Canada into a technological Third World Nation.

The Internet is one of the most revolutionary, democratizing innovations in human history. Every effort should be made to make this technology accessible to every person on earth.

Instead, what does the CRTC seek to do with this transforming technology? Strap a meter on its back and make it pay higher profits to a handful of behemoth telecoms in Canada.

Bell Canada, Shaw and Rogers have only their profit margins, shareholders and personal bonuses on the brain.

They couldn't care less how transforming and democratizing and life-altering the Internet can be. They just want to make money -- to the detriment of human development, to the detriment of Canadians' pocket books, to the detriment of Canada's reputation as a First World nation, and to the detriment of future technological innovation in Canada.

And the CRTC has demonstrated with painful, irrefutable obviousness that it seeks to help its friends in industry to the detriment of everyone else involved.

Usage-based billing must never be instituted.

Internet access must be made as affordable -- if not entirely free -- to as many Canadians as possible.

The CRTC should be abolished, dissolved and disbanded.

Bell Canada, Rogers and Shaw should each be investigated for the false and misleading information they provided to the CRTC, which got the whole UBB issue off the ground in the first place.

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