The CRTC, Canada's telecom regulator, announced today that Vice-Chair Len Katz will serve as their acting chairman until the government appoints a new chair. This is not a surprising choice, as Katz has been the CRTC vice-chair since 2007.

Outgoing chair Konrad von Finckenstein had his ups and his downs, but since last year has changed in a way that is really quite notable. The CRTC has a history of caving to industry pressure and forgetting to fully consider the impact their decisions have on the Canadian public. But in an interview with the Canadian Press last week, von Finckenstein acknowledged that the telecommunications industry "has a huge social impact and that affects us all."

Canadians have been in an uproar about the CRTC’s latest catastrophic move, the decision to allow Bell Canada to implement usage-based billing. Usage-based billing (UBB), which has also been described as Internet metering, means that users are charged a penalty on top of their regular monthly bill for exceeding a predetermined threshold of bandwidth use. Many suspect that this is also the first step toward ISPs charging us per byte, the way they do with data plans for smart phones. 

Two weeks ago, the CRTC pushed Canada’s broadband policy a step backward by major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Shaw and Bell to put the Internet on a meter, and charge both individual and wholesale customers (i.e. independent ISPs) based on the ways they use the medium.

There are at least two major problems with this decision: The first is outlined in a post to OpenMedia.ca’s Policy Watch blog, which described the decision as “a blow to consumer choice, to access, and to diversity in telecommunications in Canada”.