With the publication yesterday of the revised terms of the government's direction to the CRTC, the Internet Society and Canadians have gained a significant victory. Or so we hope.

This submission, authored principally be Philip Palmer of the ISCC Board, with the assistance of Matt Gamble, also of our Board, sets out the Society's position on the MVNO reconsideration, in Telecom Notice of Consultation 2019-57. He also devised a new name for facilities-based consultation, shortened to FBC. He called it "faith-based competition". Cruel but fair.

I may be adding two and two and getting seventeen, but I suspect there is a connection between Tim Wu's thesis in "The Curse of Bigness" and a recent article about our Competition Bureau, which is pondering getting rid of the "efficiency defence".

Pierre Karl Péladeau, owner and head of Videotron, spoke at the Canadian Club lunch yesterday (Monday April 8, 2019) at the Chateau Laurier. He was unusually charming. The two thrusts of his speech were that

·       Internet-based services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime were cutting into the revenues available for Canadian televisual productions, and

•        Bell services in Quebec collect much higher royalties per head than  does Videotron, assisted both by CRTC actions and its indifference. 

Christine Dobby of the Globe and Mail reported last week that an old colleague of mine from Department of Communications days had committed a no-no by accepting a million dollar contract from the Axis of Evil while still working for the government of Canada. (With apologies to Bell - they are really not that bad).

I agree with this, wholeheartedly. To hell with facilities-based competition, as a concept.

https://www.cdhowe.org/intelligence-memos/konrad-w-von-finckenstein-direction-crtc-re-competition

Tim

 Greetings. I was forwarded your recent blog and regretfully have to say you are misstating my views. Since 1978 I have urged a directive power and had that endorsed by Lambert, economic council and indirectly the Law Reform Commission. I supported Bernier’s directive even though it came close to amending the legislation. I have no problems with the principle of a directive although I think Bain’s has a strong hint of the same shopping list approach found in the Telecom Act and thus gives the CRTC considerable discretion in following, unlike Bernier’s.

Esteemed Professor Schultz:

So noted.

Denton

First, Navdeep Bains is owed our thanks for intervening with the CRTC by means of his proposed directive. It says all the right things, and it will almost certainly do some good. I will proceed to talk about how the obvious intent of policy directives can be avoided by the regulator, and not always in bad faith.

The Canadian Media Producers Association met this week in Ottawa. There was a Twitter hiccup in a panel discussion about the head of the CBC alluding to Netflix and cultural imperialism in the same breath. I would like to point out that whatever Catherine Tait said, it was a jeu d'esprit of no real significance. The deeper nonsense came from the CMPA's President, Reynolds Mastin, who maintained the true faith of Canadian regulated broadcasting. Near the end of the plenary  at https://www.facebook.com/theCMPA/videos/872222383169417/ at 1:22:00 he lets Netflix have a blast of it. I quote him below.

Here is a hyperlink to the submission we made on January 11 to the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review  

Main points (which are my interpretation of the document):

1. Put the Internet at the centre of all considerations of what needs to be done. That means we must stop trying to subordinate the Internet to producers'  concerns.

2. Split the regulation of telecommunications from broadcasting, administratively. Do to the regulatory agency what was done inside government thirty years ago to separate telecoms from broadcasting policy.

3. Put the interests of consumers at the heart of regulatory decision making.

4. Appoint telecommunications commissioners who are knowledgeable and competent.

5. Do not try to extend the Broadcasting Act to the Internet.

6. Allow for much greater cooperation of the new telecommunications regulator with the Competition Commissioner, the Privacy Commissioners and other agencies, as needed.

7. Spectrum management legislation should be introduced to deal with the planning of spectrum use, the allocation of frequency blocks for specific purposes, the award of spectrum licences by auctions, and the re-farming of outstanding spectrum to other uses. 

8. Spectrum planning and management functions should be confided to the telecommunications regulator.

9. The broadcasting regulator should concern itself with the conditions under which programming should be subsidized, tax credits made available, and programming made discoverable.

10. If you do nothing else, split the telecommunications regulatory functions from the broadcasting regulatory functions. The current Broadcasting Act and the regulation it engenders is focused on the interests of producers and will remain - to that extent - unreformable. Cultural concerns distort telecommunications and Internet policy, and only by divorcing them will Canada make maximum benefit of the Internet.

I had the pleasure of sitting beside Maxime Bernier on the Toronto-Ottawa flight the other day. I asked him how things were going. He responded with some impressive numbers of supporters, members and donations to his new party. I spoke of having been an appointee at the CRTC, and we spoke of a friend in common, Michel Morin, who was a commissioner when I was. Both Morin and Bernier are Beaucerons, and they seem to breed independent-minded people in that part of Quebec.

Chairman Ian Scott is most assuredly correct in his request for more power over the placement of electronic equipment, in the light of the approach of 5G technologies. It is reassuring to see that the Canadian regulator is showing signs of active engagement with how Canada will need to adapt to the requirements of 5G. It is also instructive to read how far in advance the European Union appears to be relative to us in comprehending what needs to be done.

The CRTC turned back the application of the Fair Play Coalition. The people have Canada have much to be grateful for in this.

Geoff Huston, chief scientist for APNIC, spoke to the Internet Society of Canada yesterday. His speech is vitally important for understanding the Internet of today. The picture is dark. You ought to know about it.

Castle Howard

The revelation of the political views of Google's senior management after the Trump election comes as no surprize. They are all Bay Area liberals. What is odd is how much Google appears as a Guardian institution, not a business.

This tidbit from Spiked on Line:

From an elite perspective, a key danger of social media is that it allows political trends outside of the mainstream to spread their arguments more easily. Yascha Mounk, a politics lecturer at Harvard and executive director at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, has expressed this fear in relation to the decline of traditional media ‘gatekeepers’ in the US.

Geoff Huston is one of the very few people making sense of why the Internet is evolving as it is. His speech to the ENOG conference last year on the Death of Transit shows how the fundamental forces are playing out. Content services are replacing carriers. Pay attention - there will be questions later.

A fine article is found in City Journal by Mark P. Mills on the subject of new industries and regulation. In particular, it compares the effects of the railway/telegraph combination with modern content networks. His conclusion:

Thoughts on the CRTC’s “Harnessing Change: The Future of Programming Distribution in Canada”, Report to the Governor in Council

The problems start with the title. “Harnessing Change” reflects a long history of Canadian governments and the CRTC sticking fingers in holes in the dike of broadcasting policy and regulation, to keep out invading hordes, while communications technologies undermine the dike's foundations — from without and from within — because Canadians have consistently been early, eager and rapid, adopters.  

The FCC Chairman, Ajit Pai, defended the abolition of net neutrality regulation in the United States in the following terms, which imply that, in a duopoly, we have an adequate choice.