The decision was made on Friday after hearing submissions from Rogers and the Competition Commissioner on the matter. A case document on the Competition Tribunal’s website said “questions relating to network outages are relevant under the pleadings of these proceedings”. The Court was steadfastly against Rogers’ takeover of Shaw because it could lessen competition. CBC News has contacted the regulator to request more information about Friday’s decision. “It may be relevant to the regulators. I don’t think it will be relevant overall,” said Patrick Horan, portfolio manager at Agilith Capital, adding that the regulator could use the disruption to build its position against Rogers and seek more concessions during merger hearings. “That’s just part of the game of negotiation,” he said. “That’s how I would see it… I think as a good negotiator you just don’t let anything go for free. You want to make something and you want to get something in return or keep it in case it might be useful later.”
The decision comes after Rogers’ commitment to upgrades
The outage affected millions of Canadians, and to make sure it doesn’t happen again, Rogers is committing $10 billion over three years to network upgrades and will spend $150 million on customer credits. The decision comes after Rogers released an ad last week outlining what it is doing to win back the trust of Canadians. In a separate court document filed Aug. 15 and made public Monday, the court says the proposed sale of Shaw-owned wireless carrier Freedom Mobile to Videotron Ltd. of Quebecor Inc. is not an “effective remedy” as it “fails to eliminate the substantial lessening and prevention of competition” that the transaction could cause. Rogers plans to sell Freedom to Quebecor for $2.85 billion, hoping the move will assuage federal regulators’ concerns about Shaw’s proposed takeover. IN PHOTOS | What the Rogers outage looked like on July 8:
