Preface

• Author: Robert G. Howell
• Profession: Professor. Faculty of Law University of Victoria British Columbia
• Pages: 15-19

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PR EFAC E

Few areas of law and policy have seen change so dramatic and encom-

passing as telecommunications. Historically contained as an admin-

istrative and regulatory subject of telecommunications (telegraph and

telephone) and broadcasting (radio, television, and cable) under the

encompassing guidance and control of the Canadian Radio-television

and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), telecommunications

law and policy were, almost overnight, reborn and restructured. Or

perhaps left scattered and unstructured, or “unbundled” — an appro-

priate pun. It was not simply the controlled deregulation from monop-

oly to competition in telephone communications, nor the convergence

of broadcasting and non-broadcasting service providers, that deregula-

tion facilitated. The media have changed and with them the regulatory

focused subject area.

Deregulation of both long-distance and local telephone markets has

become so encompassing of competition policy that a now signif‌icantly

economically focused role for the CRTC in this context is challenged by

the Competition Bureau as within its jurisdiction, requiring a relation-

ship to be established between these agencies. By contrast, regulation

continues for broadcasting in the traditional media of radio, television,

and cable retransmission of signals of a network origin, together with

direct-to-home (DTH) satellite broadcasts. For the latter, the require-

ment of a signal receiving and decoding device affords a measure of

governmental control. Yet the market share of these traditional media

is challenged, and regulatory capacity diminished, by the new media