Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. My name is David Watt and I am senior vice-president, regulatory, at Rogers Communications. I am here with Kristina Milbourn, director of copyright and broadband at Rogers. We appreciate the opportunity to share our views wit

Industry committee  Yes, for Rogers.

Industry committee  I was going to say that exactly that situation has received a fair amount of press coverage. There have been various appeals and legal wranglings. It is shut down currently. However, we're still looking probably out a year before we actually go to trial in that particular case.

Industry committee  Certainly. A vertically integrated company, in our context, is one that owns content, and then as you go up, it is vertically integrated because that content is then distributed through the distribution arm, whether it be the wireless company or the cable company. It's vertically

Industry committee  Yes, they do, but the key point to remember is that net neutrality is the free flow of legal content. We're discussing illegal content here. In all legal content there's equal treatment of the bits, but with respect to illegal content over the web, that type of content is not acc

Industry committee  For Rogers, I would rank our rollout of the skinny package as having been a success. We rolled it out on time, as required. It is now the foundational package of all of our cable TV packages. We start with our starter package at $25. For Rogers, we include the “four plus one” U

Industry committee  If I could interject, that's exactly the intent of both the FairPlay application and the injunctive relief, that there would be an order to ISPs to block the IP address from which that stream is coming.

Industry committee  That's the commercial entity that's doing it, not the end-user. It's the person who has the server with that IP address on it. It's to block that.

Industry committee  In terms of the new tools and technologies, I think many of them exist today. The Sandvine analytics allow us to identify the high upstream loaders. As Mr. Graham mentioned, the question is, how do people obtain this content? They will literally set up 60 set-top boxes, tune one

Industry committee  Yes, there's the packet inspection equipment that is available to provide insight into what is buried in the packets, but effectively, we cannot use it to throttle or discriminate between the bits. It's really for informational purposes only.

Industry committee  It's the same answer.

Industry committee  I was just going to add, as well, that the reason for the desire for an order from the CRTC for the blocking would be that the order would apply to all ISPs. For example, to go back to the very start of the question, if one of us felt we were authorized to do this.... We're not,

Industry committee  Could I just make two points there? One, where this regime has been put in place, there's been a 70% to 90% reduction. We're not claiming that it's going to stop it all, but it has been effective in stopping the majority of the theft. In terms of the slippery slope, we'd really

Industry committee  I guess I would just echo a remark you made earlier—that is, that $900 million of Rogers' revenue was directed to Canadian content producers and creators.

Industry committee  It's Dave Watt here. I'll take the first shot at that. Dean may follow up. I think we would consider “rural” to be the same metric as Statistics Canada does, that is, communities with a population of less than 1,000 and areas where the density of population is 400 or fewer per s