Author: tdenton

Ideas are both necessary to navigate the world with, and sources of misinformation. When you bump into a wall in the dark, you change your idea of the layout of the house. Unfortunately, if you are a slave to your ideology, there are no walls, you never hit anything, and you never have occasion to […]

The page on the telephone era has finally turned. The relevant question is no longer the affordability and availability of the telephone, but of bandwidth, the substrate that allows everything. Yesterday’s decision of the CRTC on basic services marks the turning point, the closing of the public switched telephone network era. Rest in peace, PSTN. You served […]

I heard today, from someone who is a position to know, that the IANA transition from Department of Commerce oversight cost 3.5 million dollars in campaign donations. The transition of the IANA function (registration of names and numbers in the root) from direct US Department of Commerce was proposed in March 2014. Senator Cruz, the former Republican candidate, […]

Prediction is risky, especially about the future. As of 29 September, the US House of Representatives has passed a bill continuing government finances, without the rider that had expressly forbidden the NTIA from discontinuing the IANA functions contract. So the IANA functions contract will expire, and the transition to the management of IANA will now […]

I have been attending the European Peering Forum in Sofia Bulgaria, and learning much. It feels as if I have inhabited the edges of the Internet- ICANN, ARIN, CIRA – until now, and finally the veil has parted and I find myself in the place where the deals are done, where the agreements are made to exchange […]

This morning’s oh-so-21st century news was that a woman was suing the manufacturer of a networked vibrator. An American woman says the Canadian manufacturer of a smartphone-enabled vibrator has crossed the line by selling products that allegedly secretly collect and transmit “highly sensitive” usage information over the web. Or, in the words of Leonard Cohen: And […]

The CRTC has publicly defended the Internet, for which Canadians should raise a cheer. It issued a letter which plainly defended its right to regulate telecommunications carriage against the pretensions of the Government of Quebec to interfere in the choice of Canadians as to which websites they might use. The Commission wrote: Consistent with the above, […]

The CRTC’s report, prepared by Nordicity Group,  on Canadian telecom prices shows that we pay some of the highest rates in the world. Citing the National Post, Canada won gold for the most expensive low-end wireless telephone service and landed silver for premium mobile phone services that include more minutes and data, according to the ninth-annual […]

The forces of opposition to bill 74, Quebec’s gambling legislation, continue to assemble. First it was PIAC, on July 11. Now the CWTA has joined the fight. The Mohawks may follow. I have previously described Quebec’s legislation as odious, unconstitutional and futile, a rare trifecta. Quebec has sought a delay from the CRTC of 120 days while it gathers  […]

The Public Interest Advocacy Centre has submitted its petition to the CRTC on Quebec’s gambling legislation. Quebec is seeking to block access to any gambling site other than its monopoly official site. PIAC is requesting the CRTC to declare the legislation to be unconstitutional, among other things. See the petition for details. I am waiting for […]

        Benjamin Klass, a PhD candidate at Carleton, and his supervisor Professor Dwayne Winseck have issued a significant report on international practices in what is known as “zero-rating”. This is the practice of a carrier not charging for the use of its bandwidth when it carries content it favours, while other sorts of content […]

By Geoff Huston and Tim Denton. Geoff Huston is the chief scientist of APNIC and the creator of potaroo.net The astonishing rise and rise of the fortunes of Google has been one of the major features of both social and business life of the early 21st century. In the same way that Microsoft transformed the computer market into a […]

The news that Commissioner Shoan was fired by the Governor in Council for cause shocks me. As Talleyrand said to Napoleon about some judicial murder that the latter had engaged in: “worse than a crime, sire, it was a mistake”. Firing Raj Shoan is no crime, but it may prove an extremely expensive mistake. Shoan has fought […]

The CRTC’s decision to support local television news is at once sensible and right from the logic of the Broadcasting Act, and slightly mad from any perspective not governed by that statute. It is right in that it allows broadcasters to shift subsidies from something truly obsolete (community television) to something which might have a few […]

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the FCC rules on net neutrality today. They did so on the basis that they are common carriers, and do not have speech rights such that the net neutrality would interfere with. The Wall Street Journal reported that: In the core decision, the […]

I used to think it was somewhat cynical to observe that, when your business model is failing, you legislate against its  rivals. Quebec has proven this point to be precisely accurate. The papers have noticed that Quebec’s website blocking legislation has passed into law. Quebec has achieved the trifecta of a law that is patently […]

The Globe reports today that Commissioner  Raj Shoan and the Chairman are at it again. If it were 1816 instead of 2016, they could have had a duel and settled it like gentlemen. Instead they have to go through the fussy mediation of lawyers and judges. The thought that one could die at dawn tomorrow […]

Terry Corcoran is the editorial head of the Financial Post, and I have had some harsh words to say about his writings on telecommunications policy. It would be unfair to base an opinion of his whole work on this unfortunate portion.   I am mystified by the apparent contradiction between his decentralized market thinking, and […]

“Canada missed the boat on regulating the Internet 20 years ago”, said Entertainment lawyer Stephen Stohn and, it should be noted, executive producer of Degrassi: The Next Generation and co-owner of Epitome Picture.  He told conference attendees that he told the CRTC back then “we really need to start thinking about regulating the Internet,” but that the Commission […]

There is an excerpt in First Monday from a book by Benjamin Peters called “How not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet”. “the central proposition that this book develops and then complicates is that although the American ARPANET initially took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments, the comparable […]

Terence Corcoran fights against bad policy night and day at the National Post. At least he tries. But on telecom policy I have been forced to conclude he only has one policy. Giantism is good, and competition be damned if it gets in the way of giantism. If that is not so, then he is radically […]

While change is always a risk, not changing is ultimately deadly. So we should welcome the the Heritage Minister’s announcement of a policy review of broadcasting and digital industries.    (Melanie Joly, above) As always, the basic question is whether the Toronto cultural troglodytes will succeed in poisoning the Internet with a requirement to licence websites, […]

Yep, I loaded the shotgun this morning and wandered out to the fish barrel, where I blasted away at hapless statistics. It was ugly. According to the Convergence Consulting Group, 190,000 Canadians ended their ties with traditional TV in 2015. That’s an 80 per cent increase from the previous year when 105,000 people cut the cord. […]

  Yep, I loaded the shotgun this morning and wandered out to the fish barrel, where I blasted away at hapless statistics. It was ugly. According to the Convergence Consulting Group, 190,000 Canadians ended their ties with traditional TV in 2015. That’s an 80 per cent increase from the previous year when 105,000 people cut the […]