There are a couple of things. Industry Canada's licensing authority is a giant stick. Take our U.S. competitor. At this point in time, while the FCC licenses many different operators, and a couple of them are actually headquartered in the U.S., none of them are owned any more by U.S. investors. I mention Intelsat, which everyone thinks of in my little sector as a U.S. company. Again, it's the giant in our industry. They're owned by a U.K.-based private equity firm right now. Now, why aren't the FCC and the State Department and the Pentagon worried that this U.K.-based private equity fund is going to ignore the licence conditions and behave in a way that's contrary to the public interest? The reason is that at any moment they can pull the licence and kick them out of the slot. When you have invested $300 million and built a business at that orbital slot, that stick over your head is everything. For instance, we scrupulously comply with our licence conditions from the Brazilians, from the Americans, from Tonga, the reason being that if we don't, we're at risk of having our licence revoked. Then we are in a terrible situation.
Listen, I made plain that it is galling in some respects to have to compete with our foreign-licensed larger competitors who come into Canada without being subject to all the rules that we, as a Canadian-licensed entity, are subject to. The same is true when we go into some of the overseas markets that we're participating in. But you just can't be subject to every single home jurisdiction's regulation. Otherwise there's this patchwork of inconsistent regulatory framework that emerges and the whole business model breaks down.
So, yes, it's true that in some ways they compete unfairly against us when they come to Canada. They're not subject to all these rules. Equally they could say that when Telesat comes down to the U.S., we don't cover all the U.S. The fact of the matter is we can't. We can't cover the far north and the tip of Florida. It just doesn't work that way.
We don't pay their licence fees because we're paying ours up here. It so happens that Industry Canada's licence fees are five times more than the FCC's, but that's another matter.
Other countries have found that there are adequate tools available to them to control the behaviour of the satellite operator short of trying to get at who actually owns the entities. You do it through licence conditions and, like we have in the Telecom Act, you do it through other statutory provisions. That has proven to be adequate in our sector.