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Originally Posted by To Be Quite Honest
Infrastructure was also built for communications and already paid for by tax dollars. Private companies bought the rights to use it, but it is still owned by the government/people and the difference is the profit does not go back to the government/people.
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Telus purchased AGT and ED Tel, I didn't read anything about them not purchasing the infrastructure those companies owned. And I can't find anything about Shaw's becoming private. So as I said before, I have no way of evaluating the veracity of your claims here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by To Be Quite Honest
Private companies my have upgraded but the main system is still public and if these companies are still dependent on that core system so IMO it would at least be tit for tat.
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Why is the main system still public if it was privatized? Do Shaw/Telus/Bell still receive taxpayer money for the infrastructure? Even if they received the infrastructure as a free gift, that's not their fault, that's the Government of the day's issue in how the privatized them.
IF the majority of the system was all they used, I might be convinced of the obligations you seem to be placing on them, but look at what the world was like in 1983 when Shaw went public. We were using MS-DOS 2.0. Computers used modems, and we measured RAM in KB, not MB or GB. It will take a lot of convincing to tell me the infrastructure established then is still the backbone for Shaw now.
All of that is pretty much irrelevant IMO, regardless of how Telus, Shaw, Bell, and Rogers ended up with the assets they have and who gave it to them for how much, that's what they have today. Navel gazing about past decisions by governments decades ago doesn't change what we have now.
The issue isn't about who owns what, if it was then it was an issue six months ago or two years ago too.
The issue should be around there being a natural oligopoly, and if there is how they go about fostering competition and fairness for all the parties. That's the job of the regulation body, not the job of Shaw/Bell/Telus. Their job is to maximize shareholder profits.
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Originally Posted by SebC
Precisely. Shaw is artificially capping bandwidth to hurt Netflix (Cable/PPV competitor), so Netflix shouldn't count towards a user's cap. Can't track it? Investment required to track it doesn't make it worthwhile? Well then, don't limit bandwidth. It's not like they aren't profiting without the bandwidth caps anyways.
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You have to have some kind of limit, bandwidth is a finite resource and every model of delivering it is dependent on overselling; on assuming that people will only use a small portion of the possible bandwidth they could use. There's no such thing as unlimited, and anyone who advertises that either has hard limits in their ToS, throttle you if you exceed some soft limit, kick off the high use users, or goes under after all their customers leave because of service degradation. Web hosting providers try to advertise this all the time but can never actually deliver it.
Far better to structure things so companies can compete directly, if a company wants to have huge caps, they should be responsible to pay for the infrastructure necessary to deliver that if everyone takes advantage of it.