Author: tdenton

This was published today in the Financial Post. It represents the position of the Internet Society, Canada Chapter.   The cabinet recently sent a message to the CRTC. In substance the cabinet declined to decide upon an appeal by the large carriers against a decision on rates for interconnection by smaller ISPs. But that is not the […]

5G is the latest rage-o-rama of the telecom buzzword industry. It is providing the carriers with yet another excuse to fight network interconnection from smaller users. In this sense 5G is a two-fold layer of BS. What do I mean by double BS? Because 5G technology is not going to be anything different from 4G, […]

  Occasionally a disaster brings a dose of reality into the consideration of abstract issues. The COVID19 pandemic points out a glaring mistake at the heart of the BTLR report. All over North America, demand for telecommunications services is surging. Businesses are responding by moving on-line as never before. Telephone usage has gone up. People […]

The carriers are agitating the regulator to be deeply concerned about 5G. Articles appear in the quality press about why 5G will generate the need for capital, and why the CRTC should not allow MVNOs in consequence. Reduced profits through more competition will make it more difficult for Canada to compete against other nations more […]

https://www.cpac.ca/en/programs/crtc-hearings/episodes/66153138/  Good morning/afternoon Commissioners, Staff and Hearing participants.   The Internet Society Canada Chapter is pleased to appear before you on this issue.  My name is Timothy Denton, chairman of the Internet Society, Canada Chapter and to my right is Matthew Gamble, a director of the Internet Society, Canada Chapter. First, a word about who we […]

Darren Entwhistle, Grand Chief of the Telus Nation, has threatened that the jobs of 5000 Telus employees and the reduction of investment if they have to reduce prices by 25% or accept mandated MVNOs. I was led to wonder whether he will have them flogged on their way out the door.     https://www.cpac.ca/en/programs/crtc-hearings/episodes/66152098/ 

How could any group of seven apparently sane and certainly highly educated specialists believe that Canada will legislate into being a system of state control of communications as pervasive, as illiberal and as unfree as what they have proposed in the final report of the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review (BTLR), which they submitted to the federal […]

    My colleague Philip Palmer wrote the following on the BTLR, and I take the liberty of publishing it here. The first comments on the final report of the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislation Review Panel (“the Report”) have largely focussed on the proposed extension of broadcasting legislation to internet content providers, such as Netflix, […]

  Michael Geist wrote: “Should the government regulate those [Internet] providers and creators, it will be engaging in perhaps the most extensive speech regulation Canada has ever seen on the demonstrably false premise that doing so will level the playing field, support Canadian stories, or save a production sector that is thriving in the internet age.” […]

  Yeah, I know. I know nothing. But I keep having this strange uncanny feeling. Maybe 5G is not the coming thing. Maybe the intensification of equipment that is necessary to make high frequencies work cannot be successfully installed at a cost people are ready to afford. Maybe it is pushing the possibilities of technical […]

I have been reading the Prime Minister’s mandate letter to Navdeep Bains, the Minister of Industry, Science and Economic Development. After pages of fluff (or quasi-religious ideology for those who believe it), we get  to the juicy stuff.   These are two of the Minister’s objectives   Use all available instruments, including the advancement of the 2019 […]

France, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Australia, Finland, Israel, Japan, Korea, China: these are some of the countries that have adopted policies granting competitors access to the facilities of larger telecom carriers. Yet all these countries are wrong, according to the Montreal Economic Institute (see “The CRTC needs to get out of the way,” Gael Campan, […]

    When people tell you who they are, you should listen. Sometimes the only sensible way to look at corporate behavior is as if companies were like crocodiles. Crocodiles need to eat, and any flesh will do: you, your daughter, your dog, your cow, or a deer in the woods. You are just lunch. […]

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. Telecommunications policy is a theatre largely devoid of ideas, and the ones that have dominated it are generally bad. By bad I mean they have fostered […]

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”.  As the National Post writes: With the Competition Bureau poised to release new guidelines on […]

  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 […]

  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). […]

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 […]

  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 From: Konrad W. von Finckenstein To: The Hon. Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Date: March 6, 2019 Re: Direction to CRTC Re: Competition Your government is to be commended for issuing its recent draft Direction to the CRTC concerning Implementing […]

        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 […]

  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 […]

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’  […]

  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 […]