Spectrum allocation is obviously critically important, and the best way I can describe it to you is....
I've sat in every spectrum auction war room at Québecor since 2008. When Québecor is bidding on spectrum, we're looking at it through one calculus, which is by asking ourselves what our business case is for using this spectrum. In our case, it's for providing services to Quebeckers. How much is it going to cost, and can we make that work? That's our calculus.
When incumbent carriers who were in the market 20 years before us are sitting in their war room, they have two calculuses. One is the same as ours, which is what's the spectrum worth to us in providing services, what's the business case, how much is it going to cost, and does that calculus work? Their second calculus is what economists refer to as the foreclosure incentive, which is, “How much can I hurt this disruptive new guy by keeping low-frequency spectrum out of his hands?” They add together those two calculuses, and that's how they come up with their bids.
That's the sort of inequity, that's the sort of distortion, that's the sort of non-neutrality that the industry department addresses through pro-competitive measures in the auction design—which, by the way, are widespread across the world. Don't let anyone tell you that purely free market spectrum auctions are the norm in the world. It's precisely the inverse. Very rarely do you see purely free market spectrum auctions across the world.