[Chapter-delegates] Competition, Net Neutrality and Transparency

[Houle Louis]

As you know Joly, the situation in Canada and in the USA can be 
compared. The regulation and the business pattern are similar.

 From what we see in Canada in general and in Québec in particular, 
Barbara is right on the fact that there is an ongoing competition for 
the use of the actual capacity . The user has more choice today than a 
decade ago but I don't see much improvement in the last mile services, 
on the contrary. The problem starts at level zero. Incumbents are 
reluctant to share any bit of throughput. The solution must also come 
from opening level zero as you mention.  If we want to reach highspeed 
level that enjoy many other countries, of course.

Louis Houle
Président
La Société Internet du Québec (ISOC Québec)
Louis.Houle at isoc.qc.ca


Le 2010-11-13 18:04, Joly MacFie a écrit :
>
> I note Frederic Donck's recent comments to the EU
> http://isoc.org/wp/newsletter/?p=2541
>
>
>     “We believe that competition should facilitate an innovative
>     digital economy. But that might not be enough,” Mr Donck said. 
>
>     “While there are many criteria for defining real and effective
>     competition, among the most important is transparency in service
>     offerings so that users have a choice of Internet service
>     providers and are able to make their choices based on informed
>     decisions"
>
>
>
> Apropos of this, I had an interesting conversation with Barbara van 
> Stanwyck subsequent to her presentation at NYU Law School last 
> Wednesday. (Barbara's theme was that blocking, discrimination, tiered 
> access etc can be, but only is, desirable if it is at the choice of 
> the user not the provider.)
>
> I mentioned that there are plenty of ISOC-NY members who consider net 
> neutrality to be a competition issue that would be assuaged if not 
> solved by open access at "level zero" i.e. the physical layer, or at 
> least unbundling.
>
> Barbara then surprised me by saying that her research actually 
> revealed the opposite to be true - that in countries such as the UK 
> and Germany where unbundling is statutory there is much more deep 
> packet inspection, applicatiion based throttling etc going on there 
> than in the duopolist last mile USA - due to the competition pressure 
> to lower prices and thus optimize value from every bit of throughput.
>
> Comments? Veni?
>
> -- 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> Joly MacFie  218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast
> WWWhatsup NYC - http://wwwhatsup.com
> http://pinstand.com - http://punkcast.com
>   Secretary - ISOC-NY - http://isoc-ny.org
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
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