Re:Canadians: Please submit a comment to the CRTC on 2011-77
by forensic on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @08:56PM
(#2200339)
It's anti-competitive because they're using a monopoly in one area to gain a competitive advantage in another area.
Bell's IPTV service would not be subject to the UBB pricing while Netflix would be.
Re:Canadians: Please submit a comment to the CRTC on 2011-77
by ataggart on Thursday February 10, 2011 @01:42AM
(#2201071)
>they're using a monopoly in one area
Then it would be the regulations granting monopoly that are anti-competitive. Again, removing restrictions on extant and would-be competitors cannot be anti-competitive; words mean things.
Re:Canadians: Please submit a comment to the CRTC on 2011-77
by mrcharles on Thursday February 10, 2011 @09:28AM
(#2202020)
Actually, the uproar about UBB specifically is that Bell is allowed to enforce it's own retail UBB on companies who use their last mile lines to user homes. Aka, it forces competitors to charge the same prices as bell does. That's why it's anti competitive.
So far as I am aware, for something to be "anti-competitive" it must restrict the (otherwise non-criminal) actions of extant or would-be competitors in a market. From what I've been able to glean about the UBB brouhaha, the change is a removal of such a restriction, thus would be quite the opposite of "anti-competitive."
Perhaps the deeper issue is that relaxation of this anti-competitive restriction would reveal the negative effects of actual anti-competitive CRTC regulations. To paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, instead of hacking at the branches of "anti-competition," perhaps you should strike at the root.