Canada still wants to "discipline the use of the Internet"

> If you make it so that fixed bills are the only way to bill customers then what incentives do internet providers have to improve capacity?

To grab customers from the competition of course?

Consumers will move from congested ISPs to unccongested ones, this provides incentive for all ISPs to be as uncongested as possible if they want to keep their customers and revenues.

Of course, this presumes there's actual competition between ISPs and that consumers can choose freely, which is why this inherently stupid discussion is only present in parts of the US and Canada.

I have a lot of respect for David Eaves, but in this particular case it looks to me like he doesn't understand the nuances of the argument. He's simply equating internet to electricity as if they were really similar things.

What he utterly fails to account for is the fact that the costs to provide a certain level of bandwidth have been dropping dramatically. You could simply be making regular, equal investments every year and that would be enough to see bandwidth rise in line with consumption. Yes, a 50% year-over-year increase in consumption is matched be a 50-60% year-over-year cost decrease.

Furthermore, Bell (for example) has little incentive to upgrade early and often if they can charge whatever they want. They can simply milk their creaky infrastructure until it breaks down (infrastructure that was heavily subsidized by the taxpayer), and then simply increase their rates to cover the costs of investments they should have made a long time ago if they didn't act according to perverse incentives.

From another angle, fast, ubiquitous, unlimited (for all intents-and-purposes) internet should be a policy objective for our government. Countries that have made heavy investment in internet infrastructure, like South Korea and Japan, are reaping the rewards. This will only become more important.

Canada also has THE most expensive internet access among OECD countries. Period. Full stop.

Finally, this ruling was about imposing UBB on 3rd-party providers, not about UBB in general. Teksavvy already had caps at 200GB and a more expensive plan that offered unlimited access, and as many people don't seem to understand, they're not using Bell's backhaul. They operate their own - they just need to access the last mile infrastructure because it's a bloody duopoly.

I could go on and on and on, but suffice it to say that David is just plain wrong here. It IS as one-sided as we think.

Actually every party in the government that was actually elected is against it.

The only people that want this are Bell and the CRTC whose job it is to regulate Bell but whose members essentially rotate in and out of the CRTC and the companies they regulate. It's corrupt to the core.