Today, the head of the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission) is forced to face a Commons Committee on the matters of the ruling that charged smaller, independent companies according to the amount of bandwidth that they used, which directly impacted the consumers, who are day to day internet users. Instead of paying a monthly fee with unlimited downloads, people are now paying for a monthly fee for a set amount of internet usage, and they are also required to pay extra money if the set amount is overused. The chairman of the CRTC, Konrad Von Finckenstein, told the MP's that this change was in the best interests of consumers, although it clearly is not. Facing the pressure of the federal government, Von Finckenstein decided to postpone the billing change for 60 days as the decision is reconsidered.In my opinion, it is very unfair to the many internet users of Canada that there is a sudden change in billing. There are many people that use the internet for most of the day, almost every day, and they will be greatly impacted by such a change as they are required to pay a very large amount of extra fees. There is no reason for the CRTC to make this change, since the only goal that they have is to acquire more money and have increased profit, even though they are still making money. It is not fair that the CRTC can demand more money from the millions of internet users in Canada just for their personal benefits and goals.
I certainly agree that the CRTC should not be eliminating unlimited internet plans offered by smaller ISPs. Although the policy was shaped to be for the good of most Canadians, which they shouldn't have to subsidize for certain heavy user, I believed that larger ISPs like Bell simply wanted to eliminate smaller competitors by banding unlimited plans which Bell themselves do not offer. More importantly, the rapid development of the internet requires the transfer of more and more data and eliminating unlimited plans would slow down such development, and ultimately reducing Canada's competitiveness on internet technology.
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