Digital Copyright Canada

I am a big fan of audio blogs. Some people call them Podcasts because Apple iPod users seem to claim responsibility for making them popular. Leo Laporte over at TWIT.tv, a large audio/video blogging network with a long history in broadcasting, tried to convince people to call them Netcasts as they were simply broadcasting over the Internet. While I'm a listener to a few TWIT.tv shows, and a few other non-Canadian shows, I have always been looking for Canadian shows that cover some of the technology and political stories from the uniquely Canadian perspective.

An Industry Canada press release provides the details (Globalive Wireless, WIND Mobile). Newswire: Globalive to respond to Government of Canada decision.

The CRTC has launched a television.askingcanadians.com site.

Note: They are using the Disqus commenting system, so my comments show up at http://disqus.com/russellmcormond/.

Professor Yochai Benkler has posted a response to some of the criticism of the FCC-commissioned Berkman study on broadband.

Most interesting to me is the final section that relates to how to regulate the market, comparing inter-modal competition (Cable vs. Phone vs. Satelite vs. power line, etc) to “open access” markets (Where the mode is not vertically integrated with all services). With my submissions to the CRTC suggesting a regulated separation of mode from services, I'm clearly in the "open access" camp.

What we see is that telco incumbents and cable companies, power companies, and open access entrants in five different countries are all tightly clustered in one high-performing corner. These are countries with robust open access policies. On the bottom left hand corner are the companies that offer low speeds for high prices. These companies are not tightly clustered, and they don't seem to be responding to any particular competitor, but are rather setting prices with much less discipline to push them to a “market price.” Almost all the companies in that bottom third corner are in the two major “inter-modal competition” markets—the United States and Canada.

Charlie Angus was in full force yesterday. He took his contribution to the debate on Bill C-27 (often called the anti-SPAM bill, although it still contains anti-malware and other provisions as well), and spoke about it as one part of a larger digital agenda.

The full debate is available via Hansard, but I wanted to highlight a specific section of Mr. Angus' contributions. (Note: Debate resumes after C-50, which may be today or later.)

I took the form at http://localtvmatters.ca as well as the CRTC form and sent the following intervention. The topic was the connections between convergence and the future of television, including local television. (See also: Michael Geist)

I suspect most Canadians have seen the advertisements from the Local TV Matters campaign from broadcast networks CTV (and the 'A' Channel), CBC, and Global (and Chek News). This includes some of the PSA's and songs they (ironically) make available through YouTube. You may also have seen the material from the Stop the TV Tax campaign brought to you by re-broadcasters (cable/satellite/etc companies) Bell (and Bell Aliant), Cogeco, EastLink, Telus and Rogers.

As a Canadian citizen you may feel stuck in the middle of a battle between massive television networks and massive communications (phone and cable) companies . This fee for carriage debate may turn out to be good news to Canadians in the long run as it may allow us to finally modernize our communications infrastructure.

>> Read full article on the new IT World Canada Insights blog.

The following is the comment I added to Grant Robertson's article in the Globe and Mail.

If the broadcasters were looking for alternatives to cable/etc, that would be a great movement forward. The underlying problem is the monopoly the cable/etc companies have on the "last mile" connections to the "consumer".

An article by Derek Slater, Policy Analyst, in Googles Public Policy BLOG, as well as an article by Timothy B. Lee for Ars Technica talks about a pilot project in Ottawa for customer owned fiber.

An article by Peter Nowak for CBC News documents Bell's latest anti-competitive tactics: applying bandwidth caps on the customers of competing ISP customers.