Author: tdenton

The CRTC was envisaged to be governed by a chairman making decisions with the assistance and agreement of a number of commissioners, insofar regulatory policies are concerned. Otherwise I could see no need to mention their existence in the CRTC Act.  The law allows for the appointment of up to 13 of them. The Governor in […]

The CRTC got it basically right yesterday. While it did not climb down from its position that video on the Internet is subject to its jurisdiction, it made the correct decision that the broadcasting regime was to be more assimilated to the Internet than the other way around. See its treatment of licensed on-demand services […]

Our planning for it is deplorable, at the moment. An Internet-centric 9-1-1 needs to be planned by people who understand the Internet. Does this not seem obvious? Then why is our planning process excluding them? Because we have no adequate planning process. Here is a presentation I made at the Toronto ISP Summit in November […]

This continues the work of François Ménard and me in “Paradigm Shift for the Stupid Network“, in which I bring together the contrast between the “End-to-end Principle” and the legacy networks, tie it in to access to high-speed facilities, and why Canadian telecom policy, like that in the United States, seems not to understand what […]

In my time as Commissioner at the CRTC, the most significant accomplishment was turning down the proposal to regulate the Internet under the Broadcasting Act. I have posted my concurring opinion in new media, the term for the question whether the Broadcasting Act should be applied to the Internet in Canada. See also my more […]

Pamela and I dig into the reasons for promoting speech controls, as the Liberals are trying to do in their Online Harms proposals and Bill C10. We live in a time of extreme cultural insecurity. 

Jacinda Ardern represents a large and growing sentiment among left wingers that the problems of climate change skepticism, resistance to the great replacement, meaning mass immigration in societies undergoing demographic collapse, and hate, meaning whatever the political left does not like to hear about race, sex, class, ethnicity or culture, can be solved by speech […]

Is a regulated Internet still the Internet, or is it a giant cable system? The following is my presentation to the Senate Committee studying the On-Line Streajming Act. We oppose C-11 because it embodies a fundamentally illiberal idea of communications; because it constitutes a vast overreach of governmental authority; and because it threatens the engine […]

The CRTC recently reproved Radio Canada for discussing Les Negres Blancs d’Amerique, an anti-capitalist and anti-English tract of the 1960s. Apparently Radio Canada should not have mentioned the title even in the French language. Only two Commissioners dissented, pointing out that the Constitutional right to free speech might be involved, a point totally ignored by the […]

Hey there! Sometimes you have a good day, and that was captured last year in an interview with Senator Pamela Wallin on the subject of the then Bill C-10, now reintroduced as Bill C11, the update to the Broadcasting Act. The issues are exactly the same. https://www.buzzsprout.com/1154654/9553337 Freedom of speech, censorship, what the Internet accomplished […]

The Trudeau government’s plans to regulate the global internet and interfere with Canadians’ freedom of expression continues to confuse the legislation’s proponents.  While opponents to the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11) are clear that the CRTC’s authority over the online world will restrict citizens’ ability to communicate without restriction, Parliamentary hearings this week elicited the […]

Ian Scott, chairman of the CRTC, claims that Bill C-11, the new draft of the Broadcasting Act, will not result in user generated content being regulated. That is not true.  A loaded gun is not intended to be used for murder, but it remains a dangerous weapon. Likewise, the direction of a car is better […]

Lipstick on the same old pig. I will let Peter Menzies say it for me.  There has been a lot of talk about liberty lately. Some, like those in the truckers’ convoys and blockades, want a lot more of it. Others, startled at the prospect of mingling with the unvaccinated and unmasked, want less of […]

  My colleague Philip Palmer delivered this address to the PIAC conference. Caution – it has a large blast radius. C-10: Three Failures There are tomes to be written about C-10, its ambitions and its failings. I would like to make 3 points: First, the restriction of free speech by the regulation of Internet streaming […]

The Basic Question Is there something in the Internet which should inform our approach and constrain the application of broadcasting concepts to it?  I think there is: permissionless innovation.      I am going to divide what I say into three themes. What is the Internet? Permitted or licensed versus Permissionless Speech Expanding the scope […]

  People think that fascism appears as gangs of thugs in black uniforms beating people up. I suspect that it first appears by thought and word, before it manifests as physical violence.  If you define the word “fascism” in its Italian sense, it means “nothing outside the State, everything for the State, and nothing against […]

  Sir Douglas Barrett, QC, King’s Bench, 1692-1764, precursor of Canada’s broadcasting legal fraternity     I see that broadcasting lawyer Doug Barrett is suggesting we vote anything but Conservative because they threaten delay in the passage and implementation of the Broadcasting Act, as expressed in the late bill C10. If you care abut people’s […]

The new Broadcasting Act, Bill C10, may be stymied in the Senate of Canada, but the actual content of its policy objectives has just been released. Heritage Canada has published “Guiding Principles on Diversity of Content online”. The Guiding Principles have several advantages over the policy objectives of section 3 of the Broadcasting Act. They are not legislated, […]

  Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Annual General Meeting of the Internet Society, Canada Chapter.   What a year it has been! The vision of the Internet that we have is one that is open, accessible and affordable. The one that the Government of Canada appears to have is of an internet that […]

    C10, the government’s new Broadcasting Act, is a panicked reaction of elites to the power of the Internet. All the stated rationales are inadequate to explain the totalitarian impulse to control speech that oozes from the new bill. The very excess of the proposed Act is a sure sign of darker intentions.   […]

The purpose of this note is to draw your attention to certain features of the draft legislation that may not be apparent and that will have long term negative consequences for Canadians generally. The Act is not about broadcasting. It is about the licensing of expression through video on the Internet. The act declares almost all such […]

The idea that democracy can be salvaged through the sanitization of the speech that sustains it is both confused and dangerous. The Canadian Commission on Democratic Expression thinks otherwise. On Wednesday this week the Commission announced a plan for the federal government to assert a measure of control over social media platforms by imposing a […]

      Chris MacDonald, lately a commissioner of the CRTC, and Peter Menzies, former Vice Chairman for Telecommunications at the same agency, recently published a paper called Building Internet Access is Job 1.We think it is a useful contribution to public discussion of matters of national importance. There is much that the Internet Society likes. Before […]