Verizon should start contemplating expanding into Canada again just to see how much the telecoms start crying again and how they'll mount massive TV/newspaper ads to fight against it.
Our whole telecom system is a screwed up mess; the government doesnt want to allow competition since they're scared foreign players will buy Canadian companies even though competition is what will force the Big 3 to actually innovate. So since they wont allow it, the Big 3 dont innovate and choose to do the bare miniumum on virtually everything and buy out all small players because the government thinks that will somehow make them even bigger. But then the Big 3 turnaround and hack/slash everything they can and then do things like this so they wont have to provide basic services:
A new ask from Bell, if granted by the CRTC, would see many local news requirements for its broadcast stations dropped.
www.thestar.com
Looking at the above, and seeing a story yesterday about Bell Media's CEO asking for government assistance........ugh, I have thoughts.
1) Break up Bell, severing its media division and its sports properties from the pure Telco; do the same to Rogers and Telus. Back to being utilities for you!
2) Regulate the maximum margin of these businesses just as used to be done when they were pure play telcos, ROI capped at 8%
3) Let competition in on the TELCO side.
4) On the media side, if CTV can't make any money on local or cable, in part because they invested next to nothing in programming, having them 'donate' their local stations to CBC, (we'll guarantee continued placement on cable for them); the government will issue a tax credit for the donation, in accordance w/the profitability of the assets. CBC would incur a small marginal operating cost, but that would be almost entirely offset by better exposure to broadcast and promote its programming.
5) Eliminate Sim-Sub (simultaneous substitution of ads) which results in a perverse incentive air American network TV programs, but off-set that loss by having the CBC exit advertising on its main network, giving the 400M off-set to CBC not Bell.
6) Eliminate the diffusion of Canadian content regs through 'station groups'; and restore the requirement to each individual channel.
7) Reduce requirements for 'independent' productions so that Canadian broadcasters pick up more revenue from international sales
8) Return to channel format requirements. One of the reasons cable has lots viewers is that the channels have mostly morphed into homogeneous, mediocre, blob.
9) On Telcos, require them to share trunk fiber and cell towers, to reduce needless duplication of infrastructure.
10) Instead of a series of one-off subsidies for extending fiber, have a single government program - federal, which funds full fiber, coast to coast along the Trans-Canada. Provinces, Towns and utilities would be solely responsible for last-mile extensions.