The Price of Regulation

Let's take a quick survey of some of the recent failures of communications regulation in Canada.

• 911 Service: VoIP and wireless emergency service is lagging badly and it is costing lives. Lots of talk and no action. We leave the industry to police itself. VoIP providers are particularly prone to deferring important upgrades such as 911 since they are running bare-bones operations and are at the mercy of the incumbents who make them pay to connect to or integrate with their 911 systems. This is also largely unregulated so they take advantage of their power to make it just expensive enough to cause pain to their competitors without waking up the CRTC.
  
• Spam: Much of the email spam coming from Canada referenced in this article isn't really criminal activity within Canada. It's just that we have lots of unsecure computers being recruiting into zombie/bot-nets. However there have been cases of the actual perpetrators being in Canada, but not being prosecuted.
  
• Telemarketing Fraud: I don't mean the usual crud, it's the criminal activity of phishing and commercial fraud that is the serious problem. The Do-Not-Call registry doesn't stop criminals (no surprise) and, worse, they are now using the DNC registry to harvest more numbers to call, especially mobile numbers which are otherwise unpublished. Pressure from the US did eventually cause Canada to against criminal call centres operating in Canada that targeted Americans, despite most Canadians remaining unaware of the issue.
  
• Surcharges: It's those extra fees you find on all of your telecommunications bills. Things like system access fees and 911 fees. This is a great way (for the service providers) to increase your service charges without changing the basic service charge. It's completely bogus. The US is well on its way to implementing truth in billing, yet sadly that is not even being considered with any seriousness in Canada.

None of this should be cause for surprise. During the 1990s the Liberal federal government made massive budget cuts across every ministry to rein in the deficit. They succeeded in part by reducing regulation and enforcement. Industry self-regulation became their mantra. Of course this was not limited to communications, but also food and product safety, among other areas.

Passing laws is cheap. Enforcement is expensive. Much of the time we don't even bother passing laws. It takes a lot of public chatter and complaint to get regulations enacted and enforced. This has happened recently with food and product safety, water safety in some cases like first nations' reserves, and there will likely soon be action on prescription drug safety. Teleommunications safety, truth in billing, and performance? Forget it. Even with well-documented cases of lives lost due to unimplemented yet available 911 solutions there is only more talk. Politicians are habitually half-deaf so the noise has to be loud and sustained for them to take any notice, and even louder before they act. We aren't there yet.