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The CRTC has just deregulated home telephone service in Fort McMurray and several cities in the Maritimes. CTV News says the decision “is the first of what is expected to be a flurry of decisions that will result in home telephone services being largely deregulated in many regions of the country.”

CTV also claims that the decision “[opens] the door for more competition and lower home telephone bills.” Reading that made me laugh. How, exactly, does deregulation lead to increased competition in the current environment? As we’ve seen with the upcoming spectrum auction in the US, there are structural barriers to newcomers in the telecommunications market; in the absence of regulatory policies to counteract those barriers, the “free market” is slanted in the favor of incumbent telcos.

As for lower phone bills, well, Canada’s deregulated wireless market has given us the highest cell phone bills in the developed world. So I’m not holding my breath on that one.

The CRTC’s decision comes on the heels of the creation of a new non-governmental office, the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services. As Michael Geist notes, the new commission lacks teeth: membership is voluntary and it can’t assess penalties of more than $1,000, which is pocket change for the big Canadian telcos.

In other words, the interests of the big incumbent telcos continue to trump the interests of ordinary Canadians.

Did you know that the Canada has the highest cell phone fees in the developed world? As someone who pays $60/month for a pretty basic service package (a modest number of minutes, no long distance or Internet plan), I must say I’m not surprised. The Canadian wireless industry is simply not favorable to consumers. We pay $80-$100 a year in unnecessary system access fees; we’re locked into long-term contracts (it would cost me $200 if I wanted to leave Rogers before my contract expires); and our phones only work with the service provider we bought them from. Sure, we finally got phone number portability last week — but we should have had that years ago.

If the NDP can push to get rid of ATM fees, surely something can be done about the sorry state of the cell phone market in this country.

(Hat tip to Michael Geist, as usual.)

Just saw this post on Michael Geist’s blog:

Starting tomorrow, China’s Ministry of Information Industry plans to begin offering four country-code domains. In addition to the dot-cn country code domain, three new Chinese character domains are on the way: dot-China, dot-net, and dot-com. As the People’s Daily Online notes this “means Internet users don’t have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of the United States.” In other words, the Chinese Internet becomes a reality tomorrow. With it, the rules of the game may change as 110 million Internet users will suddenly have access to a competing dot-com (albeit in a different character set) and will no longer rely exclusively on ICANN for the resolution of Internet domain name queries.

Geist also has some good context and analysis of what this means. (Andy Oram also wrote a good backgrounder on the issues last October.) It will be interesting to see how things develop.