Here are some excerpts from a must-read piece from Andrew Coyne called:

Canada’s telecom industry in need of real competition

No sooner had the Conservative government issued its decision blocking Telus from taking over Mobilicity than the Conservative party was raising funds off it. “Our Conservative government is taking action to reduce your cellphone bill,” ran the pitch, in emails that went out to party supporters that same day. “We will not allow the big telecommunications companies to shut down competition.”

That’s nice. But the competition the government wants to protect is not competition as you or I understand it, where all the players are free to buy and sell in open markets and may the best firm win. Rather, it’s a carefully circumscribed, artificially sustained affair, a kind of hothouse competition in which the weaker firms are kept in the game by government action, a simulacrum designed to preserve the illusion of competition in place of the real thing. That may be good for the industry, but it’s not clear it’s good for consumers…

…wireless is not the only part of the telecom sector where this sort of highly directed competition is the rule. Across the television and Internet universe, also dominated by Rogers, Bell and Telus, along with Shaw Cable in the West and a handful of other players, the CRTC is engaged in the same kind of complex jiggery-pokery. As with wireless, this is sometimes subject to cabinet override, adding a second layer of unpredictability.

The issue here is that the major carriers, the people who own the “pipes,” are also involved in producing the content that travels along them – in competition, as it were, with their customers, the television networks and smaller Internet service providers that pay to use them. The carriers’ obvious conflict of interest in this regard is a constant source of controversy.

The flare-up over usage-based billing, for example, was in part based on the suspicion that the caps were aimed at limiting the retail ISPs’ share of the market. So, too, the recent CRTC hearings on “mandatory carriage” heard accusations that the carriers were favouring their own offerings over those of the applicants. The industry is consumed with this, an endless game of point-the-finger, again aimed at persuading the regulators, rather than consumers.

We’ve tried the government’s way. It hasn’t worked. Protecting consumers from the ill effects of fake competition may give the Conservatives an issue to raise funds with. But personally, I’d rather have real competition.

Things have changed a bit over the years

Our pals at Rogers commissioned a study on Canadians and how they are consuming television and the results are staggering.

For Rogers that is – and also for all the other TV providers out there.

It turns out Canadians don’t like being force fed what they watch and when they watch it anymore and increasingly are taking matters into their own hands.

When commercial TV first was thrust upon the masses in the ’50’s, the single most important person for any broadcaster was the Director of Programming. His job – it was always a he – was to decide who got to watch what and when they got to watch it. Omnipotent, they only answered to the network heads – and Program Directors at the handful of other channels where all mighty ratings were the only measure of  failure or success.

That model remained unchanged until very recently when things like the cable channel explosion, VCRs, TIVO, PVRs, Netflix and Peer-to-Peer all became available. Suddenly the Program Director’s job was taken away.

They no longer made decisions for us. Instead we watched on our schedule not theirs.

Also there’s this – our schedules are pretty weird.

In the poll of 1,275 Canadians conducted by Head Research, viewers were asked how many episodes of a show they went through consecutively during a binge-watching session on a weeknight or on a weekend. (You can review the survey here).

81 per cent of respondents said they watched three or more episodes of a series during a viewing marathon in the past year. The average during the week was four straight episodes and it was 4.6 on weekends.

Unlimited Internet Makes Canadians Binge on TV

When asked how many episodes of a show they watched consecutively during a viewing binge, the respondents who were 34 and younger averaged 5.4 episodes on a weeknight and 6.6 episodes on a weekend. Among those 55 and older, the averages were 3.2 on a weeknight and 3.3 episodes on a weekend.

So it’s not just the hipsters who are doing it – we basically all are. And Rogers, Bell and Telus have serious issues with this because, one, they depend on traditional advertising dollars to pay for all this programming, which bingers skip through, and two, we’re getting our programming elsewhere.

Unlimited High Speed Internet, and therefore unlimited downloads allows Canadians to “cut the cable” in record numbers. There was a 12% increase in those who chose to drop their TV service completely in 2012, with 2013 poised to be even higher.

Ironically the Internet providers that are driving people away from cable and satellite TV packages are the very same ones who need those eyeballs to pay the bills – and that would be Rogers, Bell and Telus. All three have employed draconian cash grabs on their customers by capping their bandwidth in order to stop them from downloading or watching Netflix.

Increasingly however, Canadians have refused to play along. They’re not taking it anymore for one simple reason: Unlike the days of old, when we all watched what some faceless programmer chose for us to watch, Canadians now have the power.

And you know that’s gotta make the Big Three very, very nervous.