CRTC should have power to investigate, monitor net neutrality, says Directors Guild

OTTAWA--The CRTC should have the funding and powers necessary to investigate and monitor network neutrality, the Directors Guild of Canada (DGC) says in a submission for Industry Canada’s digital economy consultation. “e recommend that the government require, and allocate funding for, the CRTC to monitor network neutrality internally, and to investigate issues that may arise from time to time,” the labour organization’s submission said. The DGC said non-discriminatory access to Canadian content is important as more professionally produced material makes its way online. “By non-discriminatory access, we mean the scope that gatekeepers and aggregators with market power have for relying on their middleman role to raise the cost of users’ access to content, and creators’ access to other users, as a commercial model,” the DGC’s position paper, filed with Industry Canada last week, said. “While competitive content distribution infrastructure will limit this ability, bottlenecks will always remain. The service characteristic of next-generation networks that will best ensure that these bottlenecks do not become toll booths that hinder Canadian innovation is network neutrality.” Net neutrality policy stipulates that Internet service providers cannot prioritize one kind of content or platform over another. The principle is intended to ensure that all Internet users and content providers operate on a level playing field online. Michael Hennessy, Telus Corp.’s executive vice-president of regulatory affairs, said it would be far easier for the CRTC to address issues of vertical integration in the broadcasting sector than net neutrality. “To me, net neutrality is such an overused concept that it’s sometimes a bit meaningless,” Hennessy told The Wire Report. Hennessy said a more pressing issue is that today’s vertically integrated companies control both the networks and content. He suggested rules should be in place to ensure network providers don’t favour the content they own. “Talking about things like vertical integration, self dealing, undue preference to create an anti-competitive advantage—that to me is all a little tighter," he said. Hennessy said industry consolidation and vertical integration should be an area of concern for independent producers and parties like the DGC. Ian Morrison, a spokesman for the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, an independent watchdog group, agreed with Hennessy. “You’ve got a company, Videotron, owned by Quebecor, that controls the biggest French-language television network. You’ve got a cable company called Shaw, which is about to control Canwest, and you’ve got another one called Rogers, which now controls the five Citytv stations and some others,” Morrison said. Morrison said vertical integration may not be such a bad thing for small, independent producers. Those that work with broadcasters owned by large, vertically integrated companies can benefit from the capital available. Independent producers working with Canwest, he noted, will benefit from Shaw’s takeover of the broadcasting company. But production companies that do not have relationships with the large broadcasters could find it more difficult to find funding, he added. Vertical integration means there are fewer purchasers of television content. Hennessy said the CRTC could address many of the issues related to vertical integration when it review’s Shaw’s purchase of Canwest’s broadcasting assets. He said the CRTC could require that Global's broadcasting properties be held under a separate, subsidiary company. The Canadian Media Production Association (CMPA) told the Wire Report Tuesday that it supports the DGC proposal to allow the CRTC to monitor net neutrality. "The short answer is that we think that their recommendation that the government require, and allocate funding for, the CRTC to monitor net neutrality internally, and to investigate issues that arise from time to time, is an excellent one," Reynolds Mastin, counsel with the CMPA, said in an email. Last October, the CRTC put into place a complaints-based regulatory approach to deal with net neutrality. The Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC) has said the process is too complicated for the average person to navigate effectively. John Lawford, counsel with PIAC, said the CRTC could better regulate net neutrality if users could demonstrate to the commission how their real-time web surfing experiences are impacted. But Lawford cautioned that such a system would put the burden of proof on consumers to show that their Internet connection wasn’t impacted by other factors. “The company would say, ‘Well, it could be your router, it could be traffic that day, it could be that your computer is slow, or a million other things,’” Lawford said. “Until something really goes wrong , I don’t think they’ll be minded to change anything.” The DGC also wrote in its submission that the CRTC should be renamed the Canadian Communications Commission. Under the new name, the commission would take over the responsibilities of the Canadian Audio-Visual Certification Office. The DGC said the move would “create a one-stop Canadian accreditation shop for audiovisual content, including eligibility for indirect federal funding, Canadian content requirements, programming genre identification, and any other accreditation and registration functions.” The DGC said the proposed Canadian Communications Commission should also regulate competition in the telecom and broadcasting sectors in place of the Competition Bureau. “This structure, which mirrors that recommended by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner in its submission to the CRTC’s proceeding on Internet traffic management practices, would further have the benefit of bringing the communications markets authority’s specialized industry and policy expertise to bear in conducting competition analysis of this nature,” the submission said. “The idea of creating a specialized tribunal that would handle this overlap area between the CRTC and the Competition Bureau has been around for a few years now and hasn’t been acted upon,” George Addy, a senior partner with Davis, Ward, Phillips & Vineberg and former head of the Competition Bureau, told The Wire Report. In 2006, the Telecommunications Review Panel advocated for the creation of a Telecommunications Competition Tribunal, but the idea never came to pass. Lawford said the Competition Bureau has not done a good enough job regulating competition in the telecom sector. He said granting the CRTC the power to use administrative monetary penalties on uncooperative parties would go a long way. jmigneault@thewirereport.ca

CRTC should have power to investigate, monitor net neutrality, says Directors Guild

Broadcast | July 20, 2010

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