COLE HOGAN
Opinions Writer

After weeks of rumours, the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission decided to attempt to give large Internet Service Providers the right to enforce usage-based billing on competitors and customers. Go over your bandwidth limit, and you’ll pay a hefty surcharge.

Nobody wants this, neither government nor customer. The Conservative Party overruled the decision made by the CRTC to completely end the days of ungauged Internet access. Conservative MP and federal Minister of Industry Tony Clement tweeted that the “CRTC must go back to the drawing board,” and back to the drawing board they went. A 60-day delay from the original usage-based billing implication date has been requested by Bell Canada and the CRTC has until May 1 to revise this imposed plan.

What to do in the mean time? In my residence, we quickly switched from Shaw to SaskTel, as I am sure many others are bound to do soon; we made sure to inform Shaw exactly why we were switching services. SaskTel tweeted that “There are no plans in place to introduce usage-based billing to our customers.” Thanks, SaskTel; you may have the worst advertisement campaign in recent memory but you are certainly the lesser of the two evils.

OpenMedia.ca ran a Stop The Meter petition that I quickly signed online — while watching the Al Jazeera English live stream of the happenings in Egypt, researching for a paper, browsing through my Twitter feed like a mad-man, talking to friends on Facebook and torrenting multiple gigabytes of movies that totally exist in the public domain. Do you really want to stop my multi-tasking, CRTC? I get so much done!

When I signed the petition it stood at 160,000 signatures; when I checked the next morning it had risen to over 200,000. At the time this article was published the amount of signatures was over 420,000.

The villainously named CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein does not seem to mind the public and political opposition to his decision, and remains steadfast in his support for the CRTC’s decision to impose usage-based billing. Clearly, the CRTC does not have the public interest at heart. OpenMedia has set a goal of one million names for their petition and will be crucial in voicing the common interests of Canadian consumers.

Steven Chase, of the Globe and Mail, believes that the Conservative party’s overruling of the CRTC decision is a “populist move allowing the Conservatives to cast themselves as a champion of consumers.” If this is the case, Harper’s being awfully quiet about it. The Liberal and New Democratic Parties, however, have run with this issue and made it their own.

NDP leader Jack Layton attended and spoke at a Stop The Meter rally in Toronto at Dundas Square on Feb. 4. While there, he said, “The evolution of the Internet as a place for innovation and fair competition defines this generation and the next. It is the new language of our social lives, it’s an important education tool and it’s the key to our economic future.” What is there to disagree with here? Layton provided a voice to this movement and all we are reminded of is how difficult it would be to imagine these words coming out of Harper’s mouth.

Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff mass emailed everyone who wrote to the Liberal Party regarding the usage-based billing issue. In this email Ignatieff reassures us that digital policy is a core Liberal value, and that Canada must be made more competitive and innovative.

“That means expanding high-speed Internet access to every region of the country, fair and equitable wholesale access and transparent pricing,” he wrote. This may sound a bit ambitious — I’m imagining multiple Wi-Fi hotspots in Arviat, Nunavut — but it remains a noble aspiration. Towards the end of the email, Ignatieff affirms that the Liberal Party will keep the pressure on the Conservatives Party to make sure they follow through with their promise and reverse the CRTC’s decision.

The prime minister will have to tread carefully regarding this issue. It would not be flattering for the Conservatives to be portrayed as not paying clear attention to the demands of Canadian citizens on such a major, multi-faceted issue. Come May 1, if the Harper government allows a modified version of the decision to impose usage-based billing, the ramifications could be a major opposition issue in a potential federal election.

In the meantime, my roommate and I are still being charged by Shaw until the end of the month. We are going to blow out that bandwidth like nobody’s business.

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image: Flickr