Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Prioriites in Antitrust Law?

There's some remarkable competition and antitrust law coincidences afoot at the moment:

  1. In the the US Department of Justice is waking up its potent s, 2 Sherman Act mandate after decades of Reagan induced coma and focusing on telecom giants AT&T and Verizon.
  2. The CRTC is holding hearings on Net Neutrality - and the elephant in the room, of course, is the duopolistic, vertically integrated and often very conflicted ISP regime we have virtually throughout Canada, at least where broadband is available. In other words, the major ISPs may have strong incentives to throttle because of their content ownership interests, and no incentive not to throttle because there is no effective price or service competition and they can control resellers and force the latter to throttle as well.
  3. Meanwhile, the Canadian Competition Bureau - which hasn't been heard from by the public for a long time on much of anything other than misleading advertising, seem very concerned about on the "Nigerian Letter Scam." This affects about 10 poor Canadians a year who are sufficiently gullible to fall for it. If the Bureau wants to do something really useful, it needn't look far.
HK

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