Month: June 2017

Proponents of a tax on Internet connectivity to support Canadian programming production will never quit. Their arguments are: It should be done. It will not hurt a bit. 1. It should be done. Canada has always supported cultural production from taxes, so why not this tax? Internet service providers are not broadcasters, so there is […]

June 13, 2017 Making Sense of Jean-Pierre Blais   My learned colleague Michael Geist has published an appreciation of the departing chairman of the CRTC, Jean Pierre Blais. I am glad he has done so because he reminded me of several aspects of Blais’ term that were highly positive innovations. The most important of them was to […]

    The previous government kept repeating the same mistake, and it was in good company. 1. Distribute wireless licences. 2. Fail to enforce interconnection (roaming) rights sufficiently. 3. Watch the new entrants go broke and be bought out by incumbents. 4. Repeat. I think there have been two complete cycles of this, under Liberal […]

The CRTC has seized the issue of next generation 9-1-1 services, made it its own where it could, and has firmly laid out guidance for other actors where it has no jurisdiction. What I asked for in my report of 2013 has very largely come to pass. More remains to be done, however. When I was asked to […]

  Every idea is born into a world not of its own making. The multi-stakeholder idea of working out problems is not alone, then. It vies for relevance amidst a world of existing statutes, jurisdictions, procedures and precedents. Briefly, the multi-stakeholder idea of Internet governance consists of the formation of policy where all stakeholders take […]