Author: tdenton
Censorship is never out of fashion
/Bell Canada joins Google as the latest to hop on the censorship bandwagon, although not for reasons of political correctness. With Bell it is about money, which is a small mercy. Apparently people want to leave the regulated system (Gasp! Shock!) and get free stuff. Says the CBC: Canada is a safe haven […]
Read more »The significance of the Damore firing
/It is a sobering sight to see a company destroy its moral authority in an instant. Google’s firing of James Damore for his polite and well reasoned argument about the company’s mindset will have greater negative effect in the long run than any other action the company has taken. You are not being asked to agree with Damore. […]
Read more »The transformation continues
/A couple of shallow and obvious data points: people continue to exit the regulated broadcasting universe, yet at the same time there has never been so much money poured into scripted television. Or should I say “television”, in the same ironic way we still “dial” a telephone? Variety reports from a US data […]
Read more »Internet Society of Canada favours hearings on the private right of action
/ISOC Canada called for early parliamentary hearings on the delay of bringing into force of the private right of action, found in the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL). This allowed people, rather than governments, to sue for damages occasioned by the acts of others in electronic commerce, and not just spam. The Minister of Industry elected […]
Read more »The Internet Society of Canada proposes legislative reforms
/The following is a letter prepared by several people within the Internet Society of Canada and sent today to the ministers responsible for industry/telecommunications and heritage/broadcasting. Collectively, the authors have at least 150 years of experience in the telecom/broadcasting/policy/regulatory arena. Special thanks to Philip Palmer, Len St.Aubin, Helen McDonald, Konrad von Finckenstein, Benjamin Klass, Cynthia Khoo, […]
Read more »It won’t hurt a bit
/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 […]
Read more »Making Sense of Jean-Pierre Blais
/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 […]
Read more »Finally, at last! Wireless competition
/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 […]
Read more »Next generation 9-1-1
/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 […]
Read more »The Multi-stakeholder idea
/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 […]
Read more »Conrad Black saw it coming
/Conrad Black saw the Internet coming and got out while the getting was good. Speaking of his encounters with Richard Breeden, his nemesis, he wrote: “there were complaints by some institutional investors about compensation at Hollinger, one of the world’s largest newspaper companies until my associates and I got a good look at the […]
Read more »Ajit Pai’s distortion field
/Ajit Pai, Chairman of the FCC, is sowing as much confusion as he can in regard to his plan to eliminate Title II regulation of Internet carriers. His appeal to the conservative base is that the freedom of the Internet is threatened when the carriers through which we pass to reach the Internet are effectively […]
Read more »Internet Society, Canada Chapter, Chairman’s Report
/May 15, 2017 Good afternoon and welcome the Annual General Meeting of the Internet Society, Canada Chapter. I am pleased you could take the time to be here. As Chairman it is my privilege to lead, guide and follow a bunch of dedicated volunteers. Together this year we have held a number of interesting focus […]
Read more »Geoff Huston on the Internet of Stupid Things
/https://ripe74.ripe.net/archive/video/Geoff_Huston-An_Introduction_to_Internet_of_Stupid_Things-20170509-112929.mp4 There is no incentive to reduce the production of ever cheaper chips. 10 billion of them every year. They will interpenetrate everything and be linked through ever better radio. Security will never be achieved. In fact it is getting worse every day. Download the presentation here: https://ripe74.ripe.net/presentations/38-2017-05-08-iot.pdf
Read more »Real monopoly power
/Imagine a powerful life-extending drug, that also enables trained adepts to transport themselves and any arbitrarily large object, to any point in space. Move ten million tons of passengers and cargo to Epsilon Eridani? Tomorrow? No problem. No messing about with the speed of light. Just “fold space”. And the drug is available only on […]
Read more »Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2017-104 Framework for assessing the differential pricing practices of Internet service providers
/There is a moment in the movie Ratatouille, where the food critic, Anton Ego, voiced in Jeremy Irons’ upper-class British accent, pens a hymn of praise to the primacy of artistic creators. That scene was the whole point of the movie. The overhead and from-behind perspective of the scene captures the snobbish food critic, writing […]
Read more »From the department of correction
/The Concise Oxford Dictionary: Authoritarian 1. favouring, encouraging or enforcing strict obedience to authority as opposed to individual freedom; 2. tyrannical or domineering. -n. a person favouring absolute obedience to a constituted authority Authoritative 1. Being recognized as true or dependable 2. (of a person, behaviour etc.) commanding or self-confident 3. official, supported by authority […]
Read more »The right to repair and tinker, or Internet of Things 3
/News this morning from the American heartland – John Deere tractors have been sold under such stringent conditions that farmers are no longer allowed to make necessary repairs without the manufacturer’s permission, and only by going through authorized dealers. Which means that the entire operations of a farm can be brought to halt while the ransom is […]
Read more »Internet of things chapter 2
/This is going to be an ongoing series, I can tell. Today’s headline is “Women settle lawsuit with Canadian maker of Internet-connected vibrator for US$3.75M” and you are going to ask what this has to do with the Internet of things? Everything. This is the Internet of things at work, or play, if you feel that way […]
Read more »Proposed table topics
/The ARIN conference that I am attending has certain lunch tables reserved for specific topics, such as “whither IPv6” or “IANA/ICANN transition”. Frankly they leave me speechless, and I thought today we could set up the history table. There we could discuss a variety of larger issues. Suggested topics include: Could the battle of Gettysburg […]
Read more »Mobile phones, again
/The CBC carries an article today on outrageous charges for data usage imposed by carriers, despite a new code of procedure imposed by the CRTC. There is a way to fix this problem. It is well-known and has produced reasonable outcomes in wired forms of data delivery. It involves establishing a wholesale price for mobile capacity, […]
Read more »The Internet of Things: Interconnected concatenated catastrophe?
/I thought that title would get your attention. How often does your computer crash? Right. Does it matter? yes, quite a bit, if you lose data or files or a year’s worth of work. But no one dies. Now just think about your house going cold in winter, your brakes failing, the power grid going […]
Read more »Ajit Pai takes over the FCC
/I met Ajit Pai in the course of conducting my NG 9-1-1 inquiry. I found him friendly, polite, charming even, and highly intelligent. A former telecom lawyer for one of the large US carriers, Pai has been elevated to the Chairmanship of the FCC as a result of Donald Trump’s election. Pai is adamantly against the […]
Read more »CanCon and over the top
/Michael Hirsh, who is CEO of Wow! Unlimited TV, let the cat out of the bag in a recent article in Cartt. He praised the Internet, saying: “there have never been better opportunities for Canadian made TV programming. For example, digital platforms are allowing producers to make content that viewers want to see, ungoverned by […]
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