OpenMedia.ca Meets With Another MP: Don Davies, Vancouver-Kingsway

Last Thursday, I sat down with MP Don Davies to talk about four of the key recommendations from Casting an Open Net. These are the four main things OpenMedia.ca is calling for, in order to address the underlying problems that have led to price gouging by Big Telecom:

1. Transparency Audits - Finding out what Big Telecom is doing by mandating the CRTC to get information from them about what traffic they slow down (throttle), what the true cost of providing Internet service is, and what speeds they are really able to offer.

2. Open the CRTC - Create a new process for appointments to the CRTC, so that commissioners must have served the public interest.

3. Digital Endowment - When Big Telecom buys more wireless signals next year (in what is called the spectrum auction), set aside $2.2 billion for necessary Internet infrastructure. Australia is spending $40 billion - we feel like $2.2 is a small request.

4. Functional Separation - Separate Big Telecom's ownership of the Internet infrastructure from its services to you, the consumer - this way, every company - both large and small - will have to buy access to the infrastructure at a fair price. The UK has just done this, and it has been a big success in lowering costs and introducing more competition.

MP Davies was incredibly receptive, and spent quite a bit of time talking with me. You can see from the pic here that he has taken a strong stand against usage-based billing. He gave us lots of useful advice about how to tighten up our recommendations, and get more politicians from every party onside.

Getting more politicians onside will be a major focus of our work for the next few months - we really want them to understand that price gouging is just a symptom of some huge problems with our communications sector, and we need champions in Parliament to support our reforms. We're hoping our supporters can let us know if the MP in their area might be willing to meet with us. Is your MP open to meeting with citizen groups? Let us know on our Facebook page, please.