von Finckelstein (Chairman) was the head of the Competition bureau and implemented NAFTA.

Katz (Vice-Chair, Telecommunications) was at Bell and Rogers until 2001.

Morin (Secretary-General) was a career bureaucrat.

Cugini (Ontario) was with Alliance Atlantis, a film and TV company.

Lamarre (Quebec) was with the CBC.

Duncan (Atlantic) comes from various small players in the Cable TV industry.

Molnar (MB and SK) comes from Customer Service and Regulatory Affairs at SaskTel.

Menzies (Alberta) ran the Calgary Herald, a large newspaper.

Denton was on the board of CIRA and was the solicitor of the Canadian Association of Internet Providers (the industry group of independent ISPs).

Patrone, Morin, and Poirier were journalists.

Simpson was an ad exec.

If you're counting obvious (perceived) biases there, you'd say Katz is representing Big Telco and Denton is representing independent ISPs. Molnar would count as a half-vote for Big Telco (as SaskTel is an ILEC), but it's a minor one. The rest, as I see it, have no obvious perceived biases in this case.

As for the high-ranking staff, that's a lot harder to figure our their backgrounds - although most of them should be civil service positions, which means they're relatively impartial.

If we check out our lobbying disclosures (always interesting when it comes to this), we see that in the past year there have been 18 registered conversations between lobbyists and the CRTC on the issue of Telecommunications - and of those, I'd guess that the two from Bell and one from SaskTel were probably focused on Internet-related issues, whereas the Quebecor/Globalive/Shaw/CMPA ones weren't.