Your Mistakes, Bell's Profits

Because stupidity is big business for internet service providers.

In an excellent column in the Globe and Mail, Tim Wu clears the air and offers the most succinct argument against usage-based billing (UBB) you’re likely to find. On the surface, Wu says, UBB appears to make sense because the idea that those who use more, pay more, is one that we can all agree is fair. It’s the model we use when paying for gas or electricity. “If bandwidth were actually billed like electricity or water, that might be fine. But what the CRTC approved is something different,” Wu writes. “Imagine being asked to guess how much electric power you need every month, with a penalty for mistakes. Yes, that’s what cellphone companies do – or get away with – but that hardly makes it a model. It’s a system of profit premised on human error,” and it’s “abusive.” Rather than setting up a system whereby companies benefit from customers’ mistakes, Wu says a much fairer payment model would be to offer consumers who use the internet more a faster connection than those whose needs are light.

The National Post’s John Ivison has a reality check for anyone who thinks Canada’s internet users are overregulated. “A 2005 OECD study found Canada had more people per capita engaging in illegal file sharing than any other country,” he writes. “[T]he United States has put us on a blacklist of countries designated as having weak intellectual property regimes, alongside China, Russia and Pakistan.” To “clean up Canada’s lawless digital frontier” Ivison favours a Conservative piece of legislation called the Copyright Modernization Act, which would make breaking digital locks on DVDs, e-books, and other content illegal. The bill is currently the subject of hot debate on Parliament Hill, and Ivison believes that copyright legislation “is set to move front and centre in any general election campaign.” It’s a prediction we in the Newsroom find hard to believe because one, it’s an issue too complicated to hold the public’s attention for very long, and two, it takes valuable time away from our efforts to find a reliable link to download the latest episode of Glee.