p2pnet - rss feed: 15 cent texts: the real message
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Of all the recent controversies involving Canada’s wireless carriers — and there have been many — the fight over the 15-cent charge for the receipt of text messages must rank as the most puzzling.
The issue, which generated an enormous amount of attention from politicians, company executives and consumers, effectively came to a conclusion on Friday after Industry Minister Jim Prentice acknowledged that he was not prepared to intervene.
Scratch below the surface and it is difficult to understand what all the fuss was about.
Text messaging has become a very popular form of communication and the new charges felt like an ill-advised cash grab by Bell and Telus. To be fair, however, the charges are also a relatively minor consumer issue given that the overwhelming majority of wireless subscribers are not affected by it.
Moreover, the political reaction reeked of opportunism.
Prentice had endured weeks of criticism from consumer groups across the country over his copyright reform bill and may have been looking for a way to remake himself as a friend of consumers by briefly vowing to fight over the issue.
With the sabre rattling over text-messaging charges concluded, the issue should serve as a wake-up call on several festering problems with telecommunications in Canada.
First, the new charges again raise the concerns associated with long-term contracts that grant carriers the right to unilaterally change key provisions and leave consumers with little recourse (the contractual issue is currently the subject of a class-action lawsuit). Sign the three-year contract demanded by many carriers and you face huge penalties for early termination.
Other countries have recognized this problem and mandated limits on the term of cellphone contracts. Canadian officials have stayed silent.
Second, Prentice highlighted the inherent unfairness of charging consumers for receipt of text-message spam.
Dig deeper, however, and the real problem lies with the overall inaction on spam.
Canadians already pay for spam with expensive wireless data rates that do not distinguish between legitimate email and spam.
Canada remains one of the only developed countries that hasn’t introduced anti-spam legislation, an issue that falls squarely within Prentice’s mandate.
Third, the new charge is part of a broader problem within the Canadian marketplace where in the face of limited competition, consumers pay more, but get less.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has been mandated to move toward a market-oriented approach for telecommunications, ensuring that there will be no broad-ranging regulation of the wireless marketplace any time soon.
In the absence of robust competition, many consumers have been left to wonder whether some form of regulation is needed. The same questions were recently raised in Europe, with the European Commission becoming much more actively involved within the marketplace.
As the government dithers on real action, the costs to consumers and business are enormous.
The average cell phone subscriber spends more on their phone ($60 a month is the average per unit according to the BCE 2007 annual report) than a family spends on hydro for a four-bedroom house.
Businesses face high costs for data services, forcing some developers to abandon the Canadian market.
The 15-cent text message charge may have captured headlines, but it is what lies beneath that really matters.
The Canadian cellphone market is discouragingly uncompetitive and expensive by world standards. Fixing those issues will require more work than a couple of press releases and hollow assurances that Canadian consumers enjoy plenty of choice.
Michael Geist
[Geist is the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. He can be reached by email at mgeist[at]uottawa.ca and is on-line at www.michaelgeist.ca.]
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August 11th, 2008 at 10:10 am
To sign a contract where the other party can change their mind about what your obligations are, is madness. Maybe people thought “they have to be fair, because the world is watching” but apparently this wasn’t true.
August 11th, 2008 at 11:47 am
15¢ (cents) in Canada? Well, in the Lower Midwest of the US AT&T charges 20¢ (cents) for each recieved msg/spam.
It’$ all about the M-O-N-E-Y, folks… Unfortunately, I think, things are going to get MUCH, MUCH wor$e.
By the time vast majority of people finally get the ‘clue’ it’s going to be way, way too late.
How many more movies beyond Soylent Green, 1984, & The Matrix can YOU, personally, think of that has described in some form or another what is happening and going to in the future?
August 12th, 2008 at 5:29 am
Ok, so electronic mail is devastating the postal workers, just as file sharing is devastating the artists.
Emails should be paid by the senders and the money should go to the postal system who will the share the money with the postal workers the need to feed their families even as they have no work to do because physical letters are no longer sent.
Postal workers should form an anti-net coalition with RIAA to advance this proposal and the other proposal for a net tax to pay for music.