The role of technology and policy in transforming online culture – chronicled by David Ellis
market forces
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…)
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…)
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…)
