The role of technology and policy in transforming online culture – chronicled by David Ellis
FCC
Open kimonos, closed minds: new risks for Canada’s Internet
58 days
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Artist’s rendering of Big Media opening their kimonos at secret CRTC meetings
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It’s very useful for the commission in our supervisory role to understand what they’re thinking and for them to open their kimonos. Some of them did offer new information, and we were grateful.
Denis Carmel, CRTC spokesman, Nov 25, in The Wire Report
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Fact-finding without the facts: must be OTT
As I’ve noted before (e.g. here and here), the CRTC’s handling of the over-the-top review is a travesty of
due process. It’s based on a fact-finding proceeding that wasn’t a proceeding, and more secret meetings to continue where they left off in March. Denis Carmel’s expression (above) of “gratitude” to the participants for dropping by to grind their own axes, without the bother of rebuttal or outside scrutiny, is a less than comforting way to honor the principle of ex parte meetings. FCC rules require that private meetings with 3rd parties be disclosed, and that the content of discussions be summarized in public minutes. As Free Press noted last July: “The ex parte process may seem obscure to most people, but these meetings have a significant impact on FCC decisionmaking.” (That article was a commentary on the FCC’s proposal to strengthen its ex parte rules.) (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…)
Get yer grimy paws off my Netflix, again (the dance mix)
89 days
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Last week the Wire Report ran a story by Nick Kyonka headlined “CRTC vertical integration rules encourage OTTs to buy sports rights: Gourd.” No prizes for guessing where the chair of the Online Broadcasting Working Group (OBWG) was headed with that worrisome observation:
The CRTC’s new regulatory framework governing vertically integrated companies may have given too much of an advantage to online content providers such as Netflix Inc., Google Inc., [and] Apple Inc.
As I explained in a pair of posts last July (“Get yer grimy paws off my Netflix”), the OTT cabal has shown they will stop at nothing to persuade the CRTC and political friendlies that new, innovative online competitors must be stomped out. They’re bad for the broadcasting system, bad for Canadian culture, bad for Canadian citizens. The group’s claims would be laughable if they weren’t part of a deadly serious attempt to win concessions. To say nothing of the fact they’re doing all this with the publicly acknowledged support of the CRTC. This time, however, the OBWG is trying to put the public interest in double jeopardy.
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To regulate, forbear or disappear: will the CRTC get starved out of existence?
180 days
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“There’s no such thing as summer any more.”
Michael Hennessy, Telus, June 30, 2011
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Over the months you may have noticed me finding fault with the way the CRTC does its job. Not only has the Commission demonstrated a highly skewed interpretation of the public interest. It has done so across an ever-expanding list of issues touching on consumer welfare: the new media exemption order, speed matching, ITMPs, UBB (times 2 or more), vertical integration, broadband target speeds, OTT content and Netflix, on it goes. It’s hard to gauge whether all this adds up to more than it used to be. Maybe it’s the writer’s cramp. A figment of my tired imagination? (more…)
Beyond UBB: the CRTC’s war on Canadian consumers
197 days
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Economic practices are the most transparent ITMPs. They match consumer usage with willingness to pay, thus putting users in control and allowing market forces to work.
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In my previous post, I suggested the consumer ISP complaints revealed recently are bad enough, but only the tip of a much larger iceberg. The more unsettling issue is that the complaints in question were effectively secret and had to be dragged out of the CRTC through an Access to Information request by Michael Geist.
Yet there might be a silver lining in the complaints fiasco. It may prove to be a useful step in moving the debates on Canadian broadband away from the much-coddled incumbents and, at long last, over to Canada’s much-ignored consumers. Peter Nowak wrote a recent post on the fiasco, referring to it as “the net neutrality bombshell” – and suggested von Finckenstein’s inability to create a viable network neutrality framework will be seen as his “biggest failure at the CRTC.” (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 (2)
258 days
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(Updated May 25)
Broadband’s 3 A’s: access > adoption > activity
There are three distinct stages of broadband development for policy purposes.
The first is access or availability - the physical presence of a DSL, DOCSIS or other connection a consumer might lease if she so chooses. As the data show, however, the presence of a backyard drop is a necessary but far from sufficient condition of broadband purchase. Our would-be customer must also be aware the potential connection exists; own a computer; feel comfortable with technology; and feel she can afford the cost. (New evidence for this well-established finding appears in the FCC broadband report released May 20: “… the FCC report also finds that approximately one-third of Americans do not subscribe to broadband, even when it’s available. This suggests that barriers to adoption such as cost, low digital literacy, and concerns about privacy remain too high.” From the press release; emphasis original. See end of this post for more on the FCC.)
The fact alleged by the CRTC that 95% of Canadians enjoy theoretical access to wireline broadband means nothing to the average consumer, let alone a Canadian too poor or technically illiterate to adopt. Last year some provincial politicians went even further, claiming their citizens enjoy 100% broadband access. As the Wire Report noted in an article dated August 25, 2010, “Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick may boast 100% penetration, but according to Statistics Canada, [only] 77, 76 and 73% of residents, respectively, use the Internet [in those provinces].” And some of those users are still on dialup, which makes the real broadband takeup in those provinces even lower.
Canada’s mighty broadband policy: build it and they will come
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Of bit caps and market forces: Why the Tories’ digital consultation will fail Canadian consumers (part 1)
612 days
Are any Canadian politicians ready to dismantle the market forces doctrine?
The current government’s digital consultation faces deeply-rooted problems which I predict will derail any meaningful policy changes of benefit to mainstream Canadian consumers.
Some of these problems are built into the consultation (point #1 below). Others are contextual – structural constraints like the anti-consumer “market forces” doctrine that rules Canadian telecomm policy (point #2 below). A third problem concerns the long-time failure of Ottawa’s mandarins to help Canadians understand their technology-related decisions, something neither public hearings nor consultations are designed to do (point #3 below).
To provide perspective, I’ll be making invidious comparisons between the recent triumphs of the FCC and the corresponding failings of the CRTC. If this post isn’t long-winded enough, I also have an opinion piece on the politics of the consultation in the current issue of Telemanagement (in which I argue that the Liberal Party, despite Marc Garneau’s progressive views, seems as oblivious as the Conservatives to the real social and economic opportunities of broadband).
1 – The digital consultation has tossed consumers over the brink, while lavishing its attention on the needs of business. Here’s a semantic clue: The consultation background paper uses the word investment over 70 times; it uses the word affordable exactly once. And that latter usage refers in the paper to technology for creators – “the value of our digital infrastructure depends on the content it carries” (p.25). This is from the chapter devoted to Digital Media and the irresistible inclination to see the Internet as a delivery system for professional content. This is a highly prejudicial assumption: that policy should bend to the needs of content creators, rather than the needs of the millions of Canadians who use the Internet overwhelmingly for personal not “cultural” reasons. Download the paper here. (more…)
