The role of technology and policy in transforming online culture – chronicled by David Ellis
affordability
How ITMP-based data caps punish light instead of heavy users
65 days
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Artist’s rendering of a world without data caps
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Yesterday I noticed a pointer in Michael Geist’s blog to an intriguing post at Fiberevolution: Do data caps punish the wrong users? The post piles on the evidence that data caps are a lousy way to discipline what the author calls “disruptive users”…
“Data caps, therefore, are a very crude and unfair tool when it comes to targeting potentially disruptive users. The correlation between real-time bandwidth usage and data downloaded over time is weak and the net cast by data caps captures users that cannot possibly be responsible for congestion. Furthermore, many users who are “as guilty” as the ones who are over cap (again, if there is such a thing as a disruptive user) are not captured by that same net.”
Upside-down policy goals
Through most of 2011, we’ve heard lots of criticism about the use of data caps in Canada, concerning both their inherent unfairness to customers and their inadequacy as a way of managing congestion. (more…)
Digital divides: UBB as part of a much bigger broadband mess
84 days
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The blogosphere has been abuzz recently over the FCC’s bold, brave outreach initiative, Connect to Compete. Not in Canada, you say? I do say, since there are four good 
reasons why Canadians haven’t got a snowball’s hope in hell of seeing a program of this nature until at least 2015:
1) Leadership. The FCC has been making headway with a real broadband strategy over the last 18 months, along with a set of network neutrality rules, because the vision comes from the top – the White House. Harper and his cabinet have never cared about world-class retail broadband, because that would put them on the wrong side of the consumer vs business divide.
2) Social policy. The most laudable thing about the FCC’s action is the agency’s deep conviction that the digital divide is a social issue requiring vigorous demand-side policies. C2C is a people policy, not a wires-and-boxes policy based on the kind of supply-side thinking that has led our nation to the bottom of the broadband barrel, if I may mix my containers. (more…)
The CMR: CRTC’s annual exercise in pseudo-science
186 days
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My local Prada outlet, where the $1,200 shoes are 100% accessible
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Last Thursday the CRTC issued its not-much-anticipated annual effort known as the Communications Monitoring Report (press release here – see if you can find the well-concealed and unidentified pdf download link). Peter Nowak wasted not a moment getting to his point this week: the Commission is peddling broadband Kool-Aid. (For you kids who’ve never heard of Ken Kesey or Tom Wolfe, here’s a hint: Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.)
Peter argues the regulator’s rosy broadband picture is baloney – check. And their numbers are cooked – check.
My lingering concern is some people might think this year’s edition of the CMR is an aberration. On the contrary. The Commission has been cooking the numbers since it first combined its broadcast and telecomm reports in 2008. Not that many Canadians are likely to have noticed, since the CMR is strictly an inside job, the kind of compilation you’d have to be paid to read. That makes the contents well insulated from criticism. After all, the boys who gave us UBB on a stick aren’t likely to phone the regulator to say, no, actually our broadband blows.
Four years of the CMR confirm two things I’ve been saying in this space. First, all this effort is just so much marketing; it has no claim to be evidence-based reporting. Second, it belies the Commission’s self-appointed role not as guardian of the public interest, but as industry clearing house, where all that matters is keeping the supply-side machinery well greased. (more…)
Get yer grimy paws off my Netflix: the scam, continued
233 days
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(Updated Sunday, June 19)
This post and the one prior are devoted to a critique of the CRTC’s OTT proceeding, oops, fact-finding exercise – and the role of the Online 
Broadcasting Working Group (OBWG). Of its 11 publicly announced members, I’m looking at 5 in order to illustrate just how far removed from a “factual” exercise this circus will be. They are ACTRA and SOCAN (covered last time), plus Astral, the CMPA and Peter Grant.
Exhibit F – Astral: “The objective is … that we maintain a level playing field within the system—a system that is a very positive and strong element in terms of our Canadian culture, identity and the Canadian economy.” André Bureau, Chair, Astral Media, April 14. OBWG member.
Whenever you hear a Canadian media mogul saying all he wants is a level playing field, while draping himself in the flag, run for cover. Astral owns 22 TV services, including US “wraparounds” like HBO Canada. They have lots to lose in the OTT wave. I wonder what they’ll say to the OBWG and the Commission… Competition? Bring it on!
The old guard will continue to find lawyers who will continue to argue that every “new media” innovation is just another form of broadcasting, and therefore has to be regulated – meaning they, the moguls, have to be protected from anything that might compete with them. Since our moguls couldn’t innovate their way out of a wet paper bag, they harbor much fear and loathing for innovators like Netflix, because innovators are smarter and their business models have legs – unlike, say, being a subsidized, highly protected reseller of US TV shows with no Plan B for the digital age.
Standing corrected: Stats Can on the Internet Use Survey
242 days
CIUS analyst Ben Veenhof provides feedback on my analysis
On Monday I posted part 3 of a 3-part series on what’s wrong with the CRTC’s broadband target. While the CRTC’s specifics – especially the 5 meg downlink, 1 meg uplink, and 2015 target date – have been grist for the pundit mill, my take is a little different. In a word, the CRTC’s regulation of retail Internet access, as well as its inability to understand how the Net works, have rendered the target meaningless.
You’ll undoubtedly want to read the posts for yourself. But it’s easy to pull out my biggest issue with the Commission’s ivory-tower approach: they’re way too stuck on the geography problem to have any time for the affordability problem. In other words, where residents happen to live in Canada should be playing a much smaller role in Internet regulation and broadband development than how much money Canadians make – or don’t make. (more…)
Misguided assumptions behind the CRTC’s broadband target (3)
245 days
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How do you know?
This is an important question in many walks of life. In the natural sciences, it’s the most important question.
I’ve been doing some work with my son recently and had a chance to see that for myself. As a medical geneticist, Jordan devotes a lot of time to carrying out research and sharing his findings with other scientists in peer-reviewed journals. In his field, the standards of proof are extremely high, both because molecular medicine is so complex and because peoples’ lives are at stake.
I’d be exaggerating if I said lives were at stake in my classroom. Yet what I teach liberal arts students in a seminar about the Internet is based on a sense of respect for the same principle: you can’t write a research essay based on hearsay.
Students make bold assertions without giving a thought to why we should believe them. Of course, it’s a lot less work for the student writer to forget the “proof” and move on. But it’s well worth the effort on everyone’s part to encourage an understanding of when empirical evidence is important and when it isn’t.
Which brings us to the CRTC. (more…)
Misguided assumptions behind the CRTC’s broadband target (1)
266 days
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A colleague of mine emailed me recently. He was responding to my April post on Rescuing Consumers from the Scourge of Netflix. He was amused. Then came this sobering thought: “Maybe things will change. Maybe. Keep pushing that rock up the hill.”
Thanks a bunch. Lately the soliloquies posted here have been sounding like a broken record and, yes, playing Sisyphus is a lot less fun than 
it looks. Why the annoying repetition? The problem has something to do with certain misguided policy assumptions that simply will not die – like those behind the CRTC’s May 3 decision, Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2011-291. As the press release says: “CRTC sets speed target for broadband Internet and maintains obligation to provide basic home telephone service.”
Here it is, one more time: having access to broadband and being a broadband adopter are from different planets (as I explained in 2 previous posts, here and here)
Reactions to the broadband target dwelt mainly on a) why aren’t we doing more for our poor compatriots in rural Canada; b) what particular speeds to target; and c) who’s gonna pay for any buildout. I was disappointed PIAC’s Lawford stayed mostly with the rural ethos, leaving too much room for the interpretation that broadband is all hunky-dory in urban centres:
“If there is no rural broadband now, there will not be any more thanks to this decision,” PIAC counsel John Lawford said in a press release (Wire Report, May 6). (more…)
Some context for Jan 27 CRTC/UBB post
372 days
by David Ellis
in affordability, Bell Canada, censorship, data caps, Industry Canada, OECD, privacy, UBB
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On Friday I mass-emailed dozens of my closest friends asking them to read my previous day’s post, on the forces turning Canada into a digital banana republic: the Holy Trinity of Cope, Clement and Chairman von Finckenstein.
Several friends emailed me with feedback quite different from the comments that have gone up with the post itself. They break down into three kinds of reactions:
- Your post is way too long; why don’t you put in a much shorter summary. Fair enough, I’m not famous for brevity, and will follow up on this suggestion. (more…)
