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The Impact of Technology on the US Energy Market

Hoskin would visit nearly a dozen different Canadian homes, moving about Ontario and Quebec before arriving in the "more cultured, more civilised" Vancouver. He became a Canadian citizen and continued to create books, each one more absurd than the last. Rampa allegedly flew as an air ambulance pilot in World War II, evaded capture and torture, and fled a prison camp near Hiroshima on the day the bomb was dropped. In Vancouver, Hoskin stayed in a West End hotel. According to his secretary's self-published memoir, he liked the waterfront vistas but found Vancouver difficult to navigate. He couldn't recreate The Third Eye's success; it had been difficult to find a home that could accommodate his cats, and health difficulties required the use of a wheelchair in an inhospitable metropolis. Hoskin became more reclusive as his writings expanded to include aliens, prophecies about future conflicts, and previously unreported escapades of Christ. Hoskin moved again, this ti...
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How U.S. Businesses are Adapting to Global Market Trends

The work's outcome may be found in the 2007 AWS spectrum auction framework and subsequent auctions, which now account for a significant portion of Canada's telecom/broadcast and internet policy inertia during the previous 15 years.The following are my ideas on why the policy failed. And why failure is irrelevant, as well as a sketch of a new policy strategy based on events since 2007.Key elements that led to the policy's failure were unique to the initial auction, while others carried over to subsequent auctions, and one was a vital policy choice that was unhelpfully left out of the framework.Timing. The auction took place in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and credit crunch. The financial scaling of new entrants began shortly thereafter and proved to be less than ideal.Continuity. The change of ministers in November 2008 was harmful. The policy creation process was initially directed by a minister who was familiar with and understood all proponents, market dynamics, and corporate ties throughout the industry. I intend no disrespect to others who followed, but I believe the minister who originated the policy would have had a bigger involvement in its implementation.Policy consistency. It was foolish for Cabinet to overrule a major CRTC judgment on one of the new entrants' foreign control status. The regulations, in my opinion, were obvious. 

The auction funds from the new entrant should 

have been preserved, the new entrant dismissed, and the spectrum re-bid, maybe with a set-aside. Given the high turnover among incumbents and new entrants, the government's efforts to retain one more new entry at the expense of time and political capital were disproportionate to their relevance.Usage. Spectrum deployment became, and continues to be, a severe concern. I'm not a proponent of "use it or lose it," but I wonder what would happen if governments enforced usage in a consistent and growing manner, including revoking licenses. In the private sector, a licensed public asset (in this example, underutilized spectrum) is transformed into a bankable asset. If it is simply accruing value on a corporation's balance sheet, it is a private benefit rather than a public one.Network access. Finally, the initial and subsequent policies left the issue of network access to commercial terms negotiated by commercial partners. Some preferred a third-party arbitration approach. Ultimately, in my opinion, its absence is the primary reason the policy failed. New entrants, particularly those unable to sell services or assets, had minimal bargaining power in "commercial" agreements with what were effectively oligopolies. Most players seeking to use a competitor's network infrastructure, then and now, do so only if it aligns with the owner's business objectives, at charges that reflect the interest level, which are frequently higher than financially justifiable and intrinsically anticompetitive.

In summary, the 2007 strategy skewed toward 

combining telecom, internet, cable, and mobile under one bill to benefit new regional entrants, as well as ambiguous network access rules for non-bundled new entrants operating as stand-alone national carriers. More than fifteen years later, the policy has proven ineffective.What happens next?Fixing the price problem will not result from modifying the policy to address the faults mentioned above and others. To me, that would be like attempting to rescue a boat from the bottom of a lake.Some suggest bringing in foreign competitors. I'm fairly chilly on it. First, outside of trade negotiations, unilaterally relinquishing a large market to foreign operators is unwise. It is likewise naïve to expect international operators to behave differently from Canadian enterprises. The only distinction between policymakers and customers would be access to final decisionmakers and leverage over them. In the automobile industry, for example, major choices are decided outside of Canada. I don't think we'd benefit from adding telecom, cell, cable, and internet services to the mix.Ultimately, a strategy founded on false assumptions set two decades ago, overlaid on decades-older public interest tests that spurred the establishment of today's telecom/cable/broadcast and internet conglomerates, will result in a policy that boldly goes where we've always been. On the cutting edge of tradition. Dealing with legacy difficulties first, then relegating fresh opportunities to a later period.

The preferable way forward is to phase down legacy policies 

in two stages.First, we should learn from a considerably more successful 2007 launch: the Apple iPhone, the App Store, and the sea change that it and associated technologies have brought to markets, businesses, jobs, lifestyles, and broad societal use of information technology.Second, we must reinvigorate the public interest tests in place (across a variety of institutions and programs). In this scenario, we're dealing with distinct tests that, because to technological convergence and business mergers, have concentrated market power in a few dominating players who are opposed to competition and antagonistic to lower prices. Given these well-established facts, it is now up to the government to rebalance the public interest test to reflect the current public interest.In my opinion, today's public interest boils down to one outcome and one deliverable.The result would be the world's strongest information technology infrastructure, universally accessible from wherever in Canada.The deliverable would acknowledge that the state and its supporters perform best when the state steers toward clear, publicly acknowledged outcomes and allows a singly focused agency to get on with the job.

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