Let the Market Decide: The Case Against Mandatory Pick-and-Pay

A proposal by the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to mandate “pick-and-pay” television offerings for Canadians is deeply misguided, according to a report from the C.D. Howe Institute. In “Let the Market Decide: The Case Against Mandatory Pick-and-Pay,” authors Lawson Hunter, Edward Iacobucci and Michael Trebilcock find that mandating consumers to be able to subscribe to pay and specialty services on a service-by-service basis  would be a slippery slope to still more regulation, and would become irrelevant at best in the ongoing telecom revolution.