Author: tdenton

The CRTC is asking all the right questions in its Notice of Consultation on Next Generation 911. The question for me is who can answer them? First, I congratulate the Commission for the serious way in which it is approaching 9-1-1. It is holding a significant public hearing, set for January 17th, 2017. It is asking […]

The CRTC is asking all the right questions in its Notice of Consultation on Next Generation 911. The question for me is who can answer them? First, I congratulate the Commission for the serious way in which it is approaching 9-1-1. It is holding a significant public hearing, set for January 17th, 2017. It is […]

I spoke on February 28 to a convention of the independents in Markham Ontario. This is the gist of what I said. “Why does the law not see the Internet, I asked?” Because it can’t. The Internet is not a legal construct; it is an engineering one. When the CRTC looks at the Internet, it […]

From CARTT: “Commission Chairman Jean-Pierre Blais seemed at several points during the hearing to be worried of having a the CRTC (an arms-length government body) directing cash for local news production”   “I’m a bit surprised that we’re going down a path where, if not government and an agency of government, part of the executive arm […]

‘Free Basics’ was one of those enlightened clever ideas whereby the people of India would benefit from Internet connectivity for free, as long as they were ready to endure the walled garden that Facebook intended for them. The Indian regulator banned it as an offence to net neutrality. India’s internet regulator permanently barred the Free Basics service […]

The incomparable Ken Engelhart published this provocative – to me at least – opinion piece in the National Post, where its chief editor, Terence  Corcoran, maintains a libertarian and completely pre-Internet idea of competition in telecoms, of giant vertically integrated infrastructures slugging it out for market share. In my time at the CRTC as Commissioner, there […]

Lest you be in doubt that the CRTC believes it has authority over video delivered across the Internet, I refer you to the transcript of the hearing currently underway in Hull regarding the policy framework for local and community television. In this portion the Chairman is taking issue with the way the counsel for Cogeco, Yves […]

I have been giving thought to the invisibility of the Internet, and in particular, to the learned inability of lawyers to account for it. I mean account for it in law. For example, the CRTC made the correct decision in Bell Mobility versus Benjamin Klass. The Commission decided that a video broadcasting application which rode on Bell Mobility’s […]

A coalition of the usual suspects has published a study purporting to show that cable unbundling, which constitutes the increase of free choice by cable customers, will cost up to 15,000 jobs in the protected Canadian television content sector. What rubbish.   It is not unbundling per se; it is the ability to get programming over the […]

Tim Berners-Lee put up the first website 25 years ago today. The occasion ought to be marked with speeches in Parliament, the erection of a statue of Berners-Lee in a major public park, and fireworks.  In the long perspective of history, the Web will rank with the printing press and the telephone as the revolutionary advances […]

The title is a reference to an early Frank Zappa tune, which only Mike Hennessy and I will recall, through a haze, darkly. Why, when the underlying broadcast advertizer-supported model is in such deep trouble, has there so much scripted television been produced? Why, when the opera houses are shutting down, according to the broadcasting industry, do […]

  The Government of Quebec has introduced its website blocking legislation. The intention is to have ISPs in Quebec compelled to block a set of gambling  sites, which list will be drawn up by the Regie des loteries: “260.35. The Société des loteries du Québec shall oversee the accessibility of online gambling. It shall draw […]

An article in the invaluable CARTT newsletter speaks of the decline of local television news. On the same day an article in the Washington Examiner bemoans the death of hard news in the newspaper business. So what is to be done? The answer is simple. Nothing whatever. How many of you now read the news on a computer […]

Freedom House publishes an annual review of how countries treat the Internet. Canada’s record is exemplary. We came third in the world, behind Iceland at #1 and Estonia at #2. One is a Lutheran society which was born in a rebellion against centralizing authority of Kings, and the other is a Lutheran society born in resistance […]

Ted Cruz, the appellate lawyer who is running as Republican Presidential candidate,  expressed concern with Obama’s moves to control the Internet. As usual, Republicans are confusing the wolves for the sheep, and being the predator party, they run with the wolves. Ted Cruz said Sunday evening that the “threats to Internet freedom” have “never been greater” […]

Odessa sits on the Ukrainian edge of the Black Sea. It is a town that, like much of the former Soviet Union, last saw great prosperity before World War 1. The twentieth century was a catastrophe in these parts, communism being no friend to economic development, despite its claims, and war of the kind fought  between […]

Today we are holding the first symposium of the Canadian Chapter of the Internet Society in Ottawa. The issues we are concerned with include the threat to balkanize the Internet through provincial regulation.   The most salient example is Quebec’s proposal to pass a law requiring ISPs to channel all on-line gambling by Quebec residents to its […]

Nothing changes faster than business. What people want, and how they get what they want, changes on a dime. Thus news that YouTube is presenting cooking shows that draw viewers in the millions and half millions is not a surprise, except maybe to the lawyers for the Canadian broadcasting and media production industries. But of course they […]

Lawrence Strickland, head of the US National Telecommunications and Information Authority, announced that the handover of responsibility for the IANA functions contract, would be delayed. The IANA functions contract is the contract between the US Government and ICANN for the registration of top level domain name root zone changes, and other matters related to protocol parameters, […]

I see that Prime Minister Harper has made taxing Canadians’ access to Netflix an election issue. How could it not be? The Canadian production community would have every Canadian website regulated under the Broadcasting Act if they could have their way. Just a little tax, just a tiny bit of more regulation: it won’t hurt a […]

Today the CRTC issued a hybrid video on demand exemption order. It perfectly illustrates the creeping regulation of speech by means of broadcasting legislation that I warn against. It will not stop; it will only expand, until the day the constitutional challenge is launched against the CRTC’s pretensions that Parliament has the authority to legislate the […]

The consumer agenda of the CRTC seems to be producing some important results for Canadians, and one of them lies in the area of emergency dispatch services, 9-1-1. When I wrote my report back in 2013 on that subject, we were unable to establish the amounts that were collected for 9-1-1 by federally regulated carriers from you, […]

The bankers and creditors of Mobilicity are trying to decide what terms to accept from one or another of Canada’s large carriers for the assets of the company. How often must this happen before Canadian governments, Conservative or Liberal or NDP (gasp!), give up the failed idea of competition through multiple carriers? I call this the […]

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross described the five stages of grief as one faces one’s mortal end. Personally I am in denial and I hope you are too, but I was thinking of her the other day as I contemplated the reaction of the ideologues of the television production community to the Internet.   She described the stages as […]