In short, the telecoms "diversified" from a provider of infrastructure services into media conglomerates. As media conglomerates, they cannot look to the loss of TV viewers as a potential gain of larger bandwidth Internet users and thus a business increase, they can only look at the bottom line and see the potentially much more profitable TV revenue decline faster than the Internet bandwidth revenue increases. The want to protect their profits but why the hell should we let them?
The traditional sell to the public is that the anti-competitive practices and monopolies provided to Canadian telecoms was necessary for them to serve all Canadians and not just 'core' markets; they clearly didn't do that though, they spent it on tv-stations and networks, movie studios, radio stations, newspapers and other content providers. They desire the higher profits associated with content and they see that users will be spending their content dollars elsewhere (eg iTunes).
The telecoms tell us that it was their absurd profits that funded the infrastructure that they profit from today and that loss of those profits prevents further infrastructure progress. But the argument is clearly a twist of the truth, telecommunication equipment has become relatively cheaper and, like all computing devices, will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The profitability of telecommunications has grown but it still pales in comparison to the much more lucrative content business.
And don't expect to see that change any time soon, the problem is that this combination of content and service provider makes it very difficult to enter either market. The only reasonable approach to a small content provider is to use the existing infrastructure and if that infrastructure was run and managed by a company solely interested in maximizing return on their investment then they would be very happy to take all content comers bidding for the space. That indeed was how TV worked for many, many years ... sort of, the technical facts of the day made production prohibitively expensive so there weren't any small content providers, only big networks.
Today, however, where content is king, the equation has changed (or at least is in the process of changing). The owners of the infrastructure are the content providers and with the higher profit margin content brings it is only a matter of time before those providers realize that refusing to allow any but their own content should be allowed on their infrastructure. We aren't quite there yet in Canada largely because of the CRTC and the previous regulations put in place to ensure Canada was served in a way that a pure-play capitalist society would not (the penetration of cable and telephone into Canadian houses is (I believe) still unrivaled in the world). But Usage Based Billing, if allowed to exist by the CRTC, would put an end to the usefulness of the CRTC ... it would prove without a doubt that the tide had turned and the cable and telephone companies will have forsaken their legacy of existence ... their monopolies are due to our societal values and paid for by our society; none of these companies would exist with the strength they have today (if at all) were it not for our public desire and generosity.
Usage Based Billing simply provides these companies with a further stranglehold on OUR infrastructure and it gives nothing back to us. I think it should be denied not just for the current Bell-driven request but also rolled back to a deny for all the cable companies to do the same. That piece of cable coming into my house should be as shareable as the telephone wire, and for exactly the same reasons and if the CRTC wasn't essentially run by the corporations it is designed to regulate they would understand what their true mandate should be. Though the truth is much more complicated in that UBB is actually a reasonable instantiation of previous government-driven mandates, it does so without understanding (whether through deliberate or true ignorance we may never know).