CRTC’s Net Neutrality Regulation: Superficial

Enforcement has always been the bane of any regulatory agency’s existence. Regulation without teeth hardly merits real attention, or compliance, from those being regulated. In documents released on Friday, Professor Geist of the University of Ottawa, has found the CRTC’s well-publicised Telecom Regulatory Policy (2009), policy which is supposed to regulate net neutrality in Canada, to be rather, well, toothless.  

Geist filed an access to information request in order to see data on how our national communications regulator was handling complaints, as established by it’s net neutrality rules in October 2009. In essence, these rules basically said that big telecommunications companies, like Bell and Rogers, can only interfere with internet traffic as a last resort. According to Geist’s findings, initial concerns that too much onus was being placed on the complainant to report and prove their case have turned out to be well founded.

Geist found that “virtually all major Canadian ISPs have been the target of complaints, but there have been few, if any, consequences arising from the complaints process. In fact, the CRTC has frequently dismissed complaints as being outside of the scope of the policy, lacking in evidence, or sided with Internet provider practices.”

Rogers has been the subject of nearly half of the complaints made to the CRTC, in particular, for throttling World of Warcraft traffic.  Bell Canada has also admitted to throttling downloads from Hotfile.com, a popular “locker” service that allows users to upload and share media files. One complaint against satellite Internet provider Barrett Xplore, for degrading Internet telephony traffic, was the only one to see actual change in the provider’s policy, after which Xplore changed its throttling approach so that its Internet telephony would be unaffected.

That communication companies would resist regulation is expected, and even the claim that the CRTC itself is often the source of ineffective enforcement is not unexpected.  Like when grievances were filed against cable provider Cogeco for limiting peer-to-peer bandwidth, the CRTC demanded more evidence from the user before it would investigate. But what is most disconcerting is that even when the CRTC does pursue a complaint, there is little actual investigation. When most investigative activity is “limited to exchanging correspondence or prodding Internet providers to respond”, its hard to expect anything beyond revised disclosures.

At the end of the day, Internet providers are motivated by the interests of their stakeholders, not by the requirements and rules of the CRTC and certainly not by any sense of “fairness” underlying network neutrality. If you want network neutrality rules enforced, you have to, in a sense, hit them where it hurts, in their profit-margins. Geist’s recommendation that the CRTC should at least be publishing all public complaints and resolutions, and that instead of waiting for a customer complaint, the CRTC should be pro-actively auditing them, would help in that endeavour as it would affect the ISPs’ reputation capital.

The CRTC has responded to Geist’s report, saying that it is trying to be more transparent and is looking into ways to make the complaints process more public, but that it is limited by legislation. Perhaps another bane of regulation’s existence is that the buck passes ever on.