Category Archives: Statistics Canada

Digitally divided: it’s not Ottawa’s problem (2)

Posted on by

Oops.

A day late, a dollar short… The frickin site crashed yesterday, to the chagrin of untold thousands of frustrated visitors. In the meantime, I got an update from Stats Can (see previous post), and landed on a really snarky backlash to the recent NYT piece (Matt Richtel, May 29) - Wasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era - in which poor people are portrayed as the real online time-wasters. I’ll get back to that after I finish with Ottawa’s digital sins.

“Even when you give poor people access to technology, they don’t know what to do with it! Might as well give a paleolithic tribe access to a chip fab, pffft.”

–Christopher Mims, MIT Technology Review, May 31

[continues from previous post]

3 – IC has excluded consumers from digital policy – except as workers and online shoppers 

Ever since Tony Clement, the previous Industry minister, began mooting a strategy for the digital economy, he left plenty of signs that he intended the beneficiaries to be his party’s business constituents. And that his approach had nothing to do with a broadband strategy. The distinction between a strategy for the digital economy and a digital strategy for everybody is not a trivial one. Two years ago, the Tories launched a public consultation process, dressed up with a 40-page backgrounder entitled “Improving Canada’s Digital Advantage” (uploaded here). I wrote a post shortly thereafter in which I laid out evidence of the government’s anti-consumer bias. To cite one small point:

“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.” Continue reading →

Digitally divided: the DC haves vs the Ottawa have-nots (1)

Posted on by

 

***

>> Updated with correction on CIUS

As noted below, I sent an inquiry to Industry Canada about whether or not the Canadian Internet Use Survey had been cancelled. The question was passed on to Stats Can, and yesterday their media relations office got back with this message:

“Statistics Canada will conduct the Canadian Internet Use Survey in 2012.  Collection will take place in October and November.”

I stand corrected – though if you look below under what was “2 – Industry Canada has cut off funding for the CIUS” (now with strikethrough), I’m sticking by my guns on the other comments.

_____

FCC’s Genachowski in San Diego to declare war on the digital divide

In my last two posts I took Genachowski to task for his retrograde stand on data caps. Today I come to praise him. Genachowski gave a pep talk last Thursday at San Diego’s Horace Mann Middle School. He was there to promote a Connect2Compete pilot program. San Diego is one of 20 school districts in the country “participating in the FCC’s Learning-on-the-Go program, which is helping schools implement mobile learning solutions like interactive digital textbooks” (transcript of JG’s talk here).

Connect2Compete is an ambitious outreach program, designed to close the digital divide by helping millions of disenfranchised Americans become onliners. The offer is a smart one-two punch: 1) get folks the gear they need, free or cheap; then 2) help them learn the many things they need to know to use the gear comfortably and become engaged, real-life onliners.

C2C tackles the tough social policy issues surrounding Internet adoption and requires unaccustomed behavior for bureaucrats: escaping the Beltway, meeting citizens on their own turf, and dispelling the belief held by millions, especially low-income families, that they have no reason or right to be on the Internet. Moreover, the cost to taxpayers is pretty much zero. This bargain is made possible by a public-private collaboration that brings together a number of non-profits, plus some big IT firms, working hand-in-hand with officials from the FCC. The agency has released a 5-page brief outlining the details (I’ve uploaded the pdf here). Continue reading →

Digital divides: UBB as part of a much bigger broadband mess

Posted on by

***

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. Continue reading →

Get yer grimy paws off my Netflix: the scam, continued

Posted on by

***

(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.

Continue reading →

Standing corrected: Stats Can on the Internet Use Survey

Posted on by

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. Continue reading →

Misguided assumptions behind the CRTC’s broadband target (3)

Posted on by

***

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. Continue reading →

Consumer surveys on “regulating” the Net: who benefits from disinformation?

Posted on by

regulator

photo: Scott Davidson (edited by D.E.)

Surveys are imperfect. They can go wrong in lots of ways: self-selection, too few callbacks, use of quota samples, seasonality effects, etc. And even if they are methodologically sound, a survey may ask questions that are mumbo-jumbo to respondents. One way to do quality assurance on questions is to pre-test them – to see if members of the target population understand what they’re being asked.

In my last December post, I cited an email from Ben Veenhof, the CIUS analyst at Statistics Canada. Ben and I had been discussing competing uses of the terms “broadband” and “high-speed”. He noted Stats Can doesn’t use “broadband” because it “was less familiar to survey respondents (it did not perform reliably in survey testing) and so the term ‘high-speed’ was used on the CIUS questionnaire.”

Garbage in, garbage out

Unfortunately, once surveys are out the door, the questions themselves don’t attract much attention. Even good journalists rarely take an interest in looking skeptically at what was asked of respondents. Instead, they dutifully add the margin of error and confidence level to the end of their stories, figures that add nothing to the average reader’s understanding. Continue reading →