Welcome to Gahtan’s Technology and Internet Law Blog

The Globe and Mail has carried a number of articles during the past several days about a recent Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) decision that would force Canadian cable companies to continue bundling analog specialty channels into tiers until sometime between 2010 and 2013. So while Canadian cable customers can currently pick and choose individual specialty digital channels, they must continue to purchase analog speciality channels in bundles by tier. While this approach may help prop up certain Canadian channels that would otherwise sink, it will make it more difficult for Canadian cable tv and satellite operators to compete with the new competition that they will likely be facing from IP TV competitors.

In my view, Air Canada has some systemic problems with the operation of its website. Although the online reservation system has been expanded to accommodate a larger number of passengers, I have personally not been able to book a trip for more than 5 people traveling together - and this problem has continued on for several years now. Every time its the same thing - everything is fine until the payment screen, and then boom! a system error. Each time I call Air Canada’s website help desk and get redirected to India. My experience with Air Canada’s India call center is that they are totally useless. For the first two years, they’d tell me to try another computer or to delete my cookies, which never worked. Yesterday they went further and asked me to try and carefully reformat the information I entered (don’t most other non-Air Canada computer systems include field validation?). So after 10-20 minutes of wasted time, I get transferred to a queue holding for a Montreal reservation person who has to book my reservation (they are usually great!). The same thing has happened about 6 or 7 times now. I’ve offered to provide 1-2 hours of my time at no charge to help them trouble shoot the bugs in their system, but there was never any interest on their part. Is this any way to run an e-commerce platform?

Not long ago, Ontario doctors (who are compensated by the provincial government under the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP)) started charging additional fees for services that were not covered by OHIP. I recently received a letter from a neighborhood physician setting out his pay-per-service fees. Faxing and photocopying were listed at $31.45 for the first five pages, and $1.23 for each additional page. Although I personally don’t charge clients for most types of “disbursements” (such as photocopying, faxing, long distance, etc.), most local law firms charge about 25 cents per page for photocopying and about 50 cents per page for faxes. Sure makes lawyers sound like a bargain.