Thanks for having me. I'm surprised that I've been beamed in for this; it's probably going to cost you in overage fees. But thanks for having me, nonetheless.
I'm here as an Internet user, and one of half a million Canadians who have signed the “stop the meter” petition. I want to start with something a little different—a personal story.
Several years ago I was living at home with my parents, and I really wanted to get involved in media-making and being a video producer. I took it upon myself, because I felt passionate about the issue, to try to learn how to produce videos. With Windows Movie Maker, a free program, and by picking up content on the Web, editing, and teaching myself the process, I produced a video that eventually went on YouTube and was viewed by 500,000 people. I subsequently got a job in the video production market, and I ended up winning a couple of awards. Later, I was able to develop my own non-profit organization.
I tell that story because if we had usage fees in place—what we're talking about, what the big telecom companies want to impose on independent ISPs—there's no way I would have been able to do that. There's no way I would have been able to innovate in that way, and there's no way I would have been able to do that from the ground up. Canadians across the country have stories like that. That's the kind of innovation that is under threat right now.
As far as I'm concerned, these new fees are basically a tax on innovation.
I'd also like to give a bit of context to the public outcry that led to this process. It's not just that there are new fees. It's not just the ridiculous idea of forcing their competitors to adopt these new fees. It's also that Canadians face some of the highest prices in the cellphone market. They pay some of the highest prices for Internet access. We're not keeping up with other industrialized countries. We're becoming a digital laggard. We face bad customer service, because that's what comes with a monopolistic industry.
I think it was just yesterday that Bell had to reveal that their metering service doesn't really work. That's a case in point, that the company would impose that billing structure without even knowing if their service worked properly. They might even be overbilling people.
It's within that context that people are really upset. They have decided to draw a line in the sand with this issue. I think that should tell everyone on this committee, and our representatives, that we need structural change in the market.
As another example of the structural problem we have, if you look at the reactions of Bell in particular to this public outcry, and other big telecom companies, they attack their own customers. In what other industry do you see that? Public relations 101 is that when you have a big problem with your customers, you admit fault.
That's not what they did. In fact they were elitist and condescending and disrespectful. That's not something you can do unless you dominate a market and you have captured the regulator. If you ask people why they're so upset and engaged, it's that context.
We're also talking about musicians, grandmothers wanting to share photos, gamers, and people connecting with their family over Skype. The reasons they're so concerned are as diverse as the country of Canada.
Beyond that, in a world that can seem precarious, both economically and ecologically, the Internet represents opportunity, free expression, and hope. Open communications hold a possibility that our own ingenuity and creativity could lead us to a better world. It allows self-determination—the best idea to win. It is this opportunity that I think people want to protect, and it's this that is under threat.
In terms of specifics of what needs to happen here, what I think and what I'm hearing from Canadians is structural change. We need to give full autonomy to independent ISPs in their billing. They should be empowered to have more control over their services through open-access policies.
UBB is really a symptom of a larger problem of market concentration, and that's really what Canadians are angry about. I didn't mean to talk about vertical integration. I hear people on the Internet saying that Internet congestion is really Netflix prevention. The reason they're saying that is that Bell and the other big telecom companies have their own TV offerings, and when they add new fees to the Internet, it pushes people back under their TV services and pushes them away from competitors online. The fact is, there shouldn't be that kind of dominance in two industries.