As I think I mentioned, retail is not under the purview of the CRTC to regulate the prices or the pricing structure. Wholesale exists because of the determination, which I think is factually correct, that you have to carve out some of the broadband that's available for independent ISPs; otherwise you would have a monopoly or a duopoly situation. So the CRTC does have some regulatory weight in the wholesale area, because they are the ones that created the wholesale market on behalf of Canadians and said independent ISPs have to gain entrance to that bandwidth that is made available by regulatory authority, by Bell in that particular case. So that's why wholesale is different from retail.
The only reason why the debate has become enmeshed a little bit is that one of the arguments against the government's position is that if you allow wholesalers to create an all-you-can-eat buffet kind of pricing model, it will affect the retail. This is the scary argument that is employed to say to everyone else in the universe who isn't part of the 6% of the market, the other 94% of the market, that if we don't have a handle on this and force our business model on that 6%, it's going to affect costs in the other 94%.
I've been pretty clear on that. That's a worthy debate to have, but I've seen no evidence of that. I've seen no evidence that this 6% tail drives the 94% dog, and quite frankly there's no evidence of that. There's no evidence that there is congestion as a result of any of that, and there's no evidence that the pricing structure of UBB in the retail market is the solution if congestion did exist. Because if you look at the pricing structure, if you've got a 25 gig or 60 gig cap over which you're paying per gig, under that model if you're downloading Netflix at 3 a.m. and go over your cap, you're charged per gig, even though there's no congestion. No one is saying there's congestion at 3 a.m. Everyone's saying there might be congestion at 6 p.m. or 8 p.m., or who knows what they're saying, but there's no correlation in the pricing structure on the retail side to fix that problem, if it's a problem. And that's where I get my dander up.
But quite frankly, I'm not here saying I'm regulating that tomorrow, because as long as we create a worthy competitive choice-based market, then if you don't like what's happening at 6 p.m. on your Internet service provider, go to somebody else. That's the best solution, in my view.