CRTC

mediacaster A petition calling for the dissolution of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, (CRTC) says the regulator has become a burden on the Canadian public, and should be replaced with a new regulator

Dear Minister of Industry,

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) was created for the purpose of ensuring broadcasting and telecommunications systems serve the Canadian public and ensure that Canadians have a wide variety of options to create and view works of media or communicate across the country and the entire world.

We, the undersigned, believe that the CRTC has become a burden on the Canadian public and are failing to perform their duties in the interest of the Canadian public and that of a fair and unbiased telecom policy.
Scrap the CRTC, petition urges An online petition to dissolve the CRTC . The petition,
 and on Facebook and Twitter, was started Saturday by Mike Lerner, a 23-year-old Ottawa software company employee, who was frustrated by a decision to allow Bell Canada to institute usage-based billing on its wholesale internet customers. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission last week provisionally approved Bell’s request to require independent companies such as TekSavvy and Acanac, which rent parts of its network to supply their own services, to charge customers by how much they download.Independent providers typically offer customers hundreds of gigabytes of usage where Bell’s most popular service allows only 50 gigabytes a month. Smaller providers now say they have just under three months to migrate their customers on to similar usage models. Once those plans are implemented, they say, their services will be indistinguishable from Bell’s. The CRTC, the petition says, is failing in its mandate to protect competition and look out for the interest of Canadian consumers and has for the past three years shown “undue preference in the interest of commercial entities and their preference for traditional business models over competing models that would create competition.” “We, the undersigned, believe that the CRTC has become a burden on the Canadian public and are failing to perform their duties in the interest of the Canadian public and that of a fair and unbiased telecom policy,” it says.Lerner told CBC News the government needs to replace the current regulator with a body that is staffed by people who are in touch with the new technology and competition models being introduced by the internet.”You need some people who have experience with telecom but you also need some people who understand the new types of competition. They just don’t have any experience in that field,” he says.