Phone oligopolies ask to deregulate

I came across this PR piece from Bell-Aliant on TechEast today:

Aliant announced today that it has applied to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) for forbearance from regulation of local residential telephone service in nine competitive exchanges in the Halifax area. [snip] With forbearance, customers in these areas will experience the full benefits of competition, with greater value through increased choice and flexible offers that can be delivered in a more timely manner.

A little more digging and I connected to an article on CBC:

The Conservative government’s move last week came against resistance from the CRTC, whose rules were intended to handicap the big telephone companies until they lost 25 per cent or more of phone users to competitors.

[Industry Minister] Bernier expects that the decision to liberate the big players will result in rapid price reductions, but consumer advocates fear the established operators will use their new freedom to squelch emerging competitors.

I don’t feel that competition is real when you only have a few companies in the market. For example, there is little competition for wireless data in Canada, as shown in this graph by Tom Purves:

I’d like to re-iterate a post I wrote last year, which discussed the April 2006 edition of The Atlantic. It included five past articles on the subject of Markets & Morals. Here are two pertinent quotes, from the 19th and 20th Centuries respectively.

Henry Demarist Lloyd wrote in March 1881, “When monopolies succeed, the people fail”  and that “The nation is the engine of the people”, in his piece denouncing the practices of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. There is little doubt today about the world wide power and influence of monopolies and oligopolies.

In 1967, John Kenneth Galbraith warned of the dangers of blindly having faith in our industrial/corporatist systems:

The greater danger is in the subordination of belief to the needs of the modern industrial system – These are that technology is always good; that economic growth is always good; that firms must always expand; that consumption of goods is the principal source of happiness; that idleness is wicked; and that nothing should interfere with the priority we accord to technology, growth, and increased consumption.

Just as each generation must work to preserve its democracy, so we have to constantly keep corporate interests at bay, for no matter how much NewSpeak they put forth about the “full benefits of competition”, the truth is that we, the citizenry, are being hornswoggled.