you might be expecting a discussion about internet costs in canada to be another opportunity for me to completely debunk market theory, but it's more complex than that.
first, anybody arguing that increasing competition will decrease prices should be laughed out of the room. that's not a serious economic position, and nobody arguing as much should be taken seriously. politicians that say things like this need to stop insulting everybody's intelligence and stop wasting everybody's time and go back to school and learn about actual economics, not a long debunked mathematical model from hundreds of years ago. but, it's not as easy as arguing that you need to get the profit motive out of it - although that's at the root of the problem and what needs to be addressed eventually.
i think you should look at data transmission lines the same way you look at roads and waterways, and that the absolute beginning point of any price reduction strategy needs to be in nationalizing the lines. if you let these private companies continue to build their own networks, and you continue to allow them to profit from transmitting data (which is rentier capitalism at it's worst), you'll never solve the basic structural root of the problem here, which is that the private companies have too much power to set the rates.
but, the real reason that the prices are so high is simply that the executives that work in these companies are greedy. they've essentially grabbed you by the pussy and said "pay up, bitch". there's not some nice little tweak that we can find to fix that at the back of the textbook, and it's not drawn out by any kind of scarcity model, you just have to smash their property rights up and put the ownership in the hands of the people.
so, that ought to be the central plank of any serious left-of-centre party in terms of what to do to get costs down. which parties realize this?
*crickets*
so, i mean, i want to come out swinging against the liberal proposal. remember when they told you that privatizing electricity would reduce costs? markets just make things more expensive...
but the other parties suck, too. and, this is a good example of the dead-end we've come to in terns of the policy desert we exist in: this is obviously a situation where we need more government to reign in the greed that markets incentivize, but all we've got across the board is a bunch of debunked neo-liberal nonsense that the smart people know doesn't work. and i want my old, more intelligent liberal party back.
i said it wasn't that simple....
canada is a very big, sparsely populated country, which means that it's going to be expensive to do things like string along transmission lines (or set up cell towers). while the primary reason for high costs might be greed, the costs to maintain the network are at least a good excuse to keep prices artificially high, and this is going to be more of a reality here than in smaller, less geographically diverse areas. that's one of the reasons that nationalizing the lines is a good idea - it'll allow for a socialization of infrastructure costs. we don't normally let private businesses build infrastructure like this, and we need to start understanding what happened as a failed experiment. but, in the mean-time, if you're insisting on a market system, and you want to take costs down, you're going to have to introduce a subsidy. prices may be high across the board due to greed, but they're especially high in hard to get places because the infrastructure is so challenging. the only way to completely undo this is to socialize it...
...but marx himself would have said that you ought to let the capitalists build the lines, and then appropriate them. so, the real question is whether they've build enough infrastructure to nationalize, yet - or if it's best to keep waiting it out.
https://globalnews.ca/news/5908780/canada-election-cellphone-internet-prices/