Canada shouldn’t be relying on 20th-century telecom industrial model: Benkler

OTTAWA—Twentieth-century industrial models should no longer hold sway over broadband development in Canada, says the author of a Harvard University report that criticized Canada’s broadband infrastructure, access and pricing. Yochai Benkler, the Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman professor of entrepreneurial legal studies at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, published a controversial report last month that sparked debate in Canada over its assertion that the country lags behind other developed nations on broadband access, speed and pricing. Benkler delivered a keynote address Friday at the University of Ottawa's Taking Stock of Tech conference, marking the opening of the university's Centre for Law, Technology and Society. Benkler criticized Canada’s traditional communications system in which just a handful of competitors control access to broadband Internet. He showed a diagram identifying countries based on the speed and cost of broadband Internet. Canada and the United States fell under the slow and expensive side of the diagram while countries like Japan and Korea were on the fast and cheap side. To improve Internet competition in Canada, the country must “unbundle” services—when incumbents offer competitors access to their networks at wholesale rates, he said. Benkler said unbundled access to the network allows competitors to apply their own electronics to the infrastructure, which encourages innovation. “Countries that have facilitated competition fall under the cheap and fast category,” Benkler said. “Unbundling facilitates entry in many countries.” Benkler acknowledged that criticism of unbundling from incumbent telecommunications companies is “completely understandable.” The incumbents argue that unbundling does not encourage the spending of risk capital and investments in their networks, which deters innovation. But “innovation comes from the edge and rarely from the core,” Benkler said, pointing to creative technology startups like Google, Wikipedia, and Craigslist, which emerged quickly and changed the way people access information. Benkler said in Europe many telecom companies climb an investment ladder, where they start small, build cash flow, and invest in their services and infrastructure. He said open access unbundling rules have allowed small and creative companies to enter the telecom market—where the cost of entry is very high—and grow from there. Benkler defended his report, titled, “Next Generation Connectivity: A review of broadband Internet transitions and policy from around the world,” against criticism that his data, taken primarily from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), has methodological flaws. He said his analysis of past broadband studies have shown a general lack of accurate information in the field. Of 38 quantitative studies Benkler’s team analyzed, 20 were self-published. His researchers found that corporations that had a direct interest in the results sponsored 16 of the 38 studies. jmigneault@thewirereport.ca

Canada shouldn’t be relying on 20th-century telecom industrial model: Benkler

News | March 6, 2010

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