Telecom Trends

Google calling

Google has announced placing calls from inside GMail and I have a bunch of questions.

Perhaps my privacy radar is hyper-sensitive, driven in part by Sarah Schmidt’s article today about Facebook.

So let’s assume that Google allows its users to opt in or out of having their calling patterns tracked. What about the people being called? Do they have privacy rights from this service?

Let’s say that I am not a GMail user. Can Google track information about who calls me? The location that people are seated when they call me? Can Google sell that information to an advertiser who can then match up data about my home – maybe even what websites I visit in my home, the people who call me and where they are calling from?

Will I suddenly get ads from airlines that offer flights to visit LA if Google notices that a phone number registered to my household is receiving calls from a GMail client using a California university IP address? Maybe Google would offer a qualified Direct Mail address list that gets around do-not-call and anti-spam legislation.

Further, the CRTC’s privacy rules likely won’t be able to be applied. Google isn’t a telecom carrier. Although the CRTC may think that it can apply its regulations indirectly, there may not be a Canadian carrier that has any relationship with Google for voice services – Google can purchase all of its Canadian terminations from US service providers that have correspondent relationships.

How will Canada apply its standards of behaviour on this service?

Interestingly, the CRTC will likely have insights into the scale of Google’s operations in Canada. Google’s voice service will not qualify for the computer-to-computer voice exemption for contribution. As such, it appears that Google will be a Telecommunications Service Provider since its service is connected to the Canadian public switched telephone network. Although its non-voice revenues will be exempted from contribution to the universal services subsidy pool, the CRTC may get interesting insights into the scale of Google’s operations in Canada.

More to come later.

View from the street

There was an opinion piece on network neutrality published yesterday on The Street.

The piece argued (and was entitled) ‘Net Neutrality is Akin to Socialism’. Long time followers of this blog will recall that I spoke along similar lines more than 4 years ago in a piece called “Soviet styled monopoly“.

There was an opinion piece in The Australian last week saying that its National Broadband Network (NBN) is welfare for tech-heads.

I just wonder if the common folks on the street understand the issue or find any realistic likelihood in the possibilities of the doomsday scenarios being painted by some.

Some will pipe in and say that a problem already arose – and they will bring up the TELUS blocking incident.

Indeed, that incident proves that no new laws are required – just like new laws won’t keep my neighbours from rolling through stop signs.

Are people getting engaged with the thought of government getting more actively involved in the internet? Are we more willing to wait until a problem actually arises and deal with the issue at that time? Is it time for Canadian net neutrality advocates to find a new cause?

Ramping up regulatory rhetoric

Over the weekend, there were a couple separate calls for the government to regulate the internet.

One of them came from a Mark Evans blog posting, wondering aloud if the government should get into the business of regulating porn, presumably using a new Porn Control Board of Ontario to raise revenues for the provincial treasury. After all, now that Ontario has decided to join British Columbia in the world of on-line gambling, he asks if we could have provincial regulation and control over another fund-raising vice.

The other call came from an opinion piece in the Washington Post. which dealt with the Google-Verizon proposal for network management rules. The main theme of that piece is that it disagrees with wireless being given an exemption from the rules.

The biggest reason to apply net-neutrality regulations to wired and wireless alike is basic economics. Anytime the government applies one set of rules to some competitors in a market but not others, it distorts that market.

And although wireless broadband hasn’t always been a real alternative to land-based cable, DSL or fiber connections, faster 4G services make it a more viable option.

The Washington Post says that net-neutrality rules do not require “surrendering to anarchy” on Internet connections; they support Internet providers managing their networks in ways that don’t discriminate between legitimate sites or services.

So if your Internet provider’s connection gets clogged because some users are hitting one site, it couldn’t cut off access to that site. But it could, after providing fair warning, throttle back those users’ download speeds, cap their bandwidth or charge them extra. Straightforward usage limits would have the added benefit of being understandable to customers and companies alike — unlike a lot of federal regulations and corporate terms-of-service documents.

In other words, the Washington Post is suggesting that the US adopt the Canadian approach.

Is it time for Canada’s net neutrality groups to acknowledge that the CRTC may have gotten it right?

How we use the internet

The FCC has released new data about American consumer internet use.

The Technical Paper [2.82 MB, pdf] “analyzes residential consumer usage of broadband and the performance of fixed broadband connections in the U.S.”

This paper is organized into three sections: the first looks at how residential consumers use their internet access service and classifies consumers into four user profiles; the second looks at the performance of U.S. consumers’ broadband connections; and, the third explains how the data led to the FCC’s National Broadband Plan target of 4 Mbps download and 1 Mbps up.

Although the data is from the U.S., there are many points that are likely highly portable to Canada. Much has been made of download caps from the internet service providers. The FCC found that that the median user consumed 1.7 GB/month, while the average (mean) U.S. Internet user consumed 9.2 GB/month. The extreme between the mean and median was explained by the FCC as principally due to a relatively small number of users who consume very large amounts of data each month – sometimes as high as terabytes per month.

The most data-intensive 1% of residential consumers appear to account for roughly 25% of all traffic, the top 3% consume 40%, the top 10% consume 70%, and the top 20% of users consume 80% of all data. While half of all users consume less than 2 GB per month, the last 6% of users consume more than 15 GB each month.

These results are from a country that already has streaming TV services like Hulu and Netflix.

Important quantitative data that can hopefully contribute to the dialog on broadband services evolution on both sides of the border.

Harming electronic commerce efficiencies

Why would we censor electronic communications that are completely legal in paper form?

This question continues to trouble me.

I received mail at my cottage last week – advertising that was addressed to me. I don’t have a mail box. All of my utility bills, tax notices etc. are sent to my home. But the post office delivered the mail to my neighbour who handed the junk mail to me.

So, some company bought a mailing list and sent me an addressed letter advertising specials that I might be interested in. Sure, it is junk mail. But there is nothing fraudulent about it. The advertiser is a real company. I didn’t ask to be on their mailing list, but I opened the letter and even thought about whether I might be interested in their product.

The direct mail piece was completely legal.

But if Canada’s Electronic Commerce Protection Act [an Orwellian named bill] gets re-introduced and passed, I find it bizarre that we will have a class of otherwise legal communications forbidden – censored - just because it is in electronic form.

It isn’t spam: this isn’t a case of mail that is trying to hide the identity of the sender; or, trying to sell illegal goods; or, misrepresent the product. All electronic communications that aren’t specifically requested will be banned. So much for encouraging businesses to lower their costs through an electronic equivalent of direct mail.

We have so many people who argue that we should not censor electronic communications that are illegal in paper form. Where do they stand on the issue of bannishing electronic transmission of legal communications?

I continue to wonder how this provision of the Electronic Commerce Protection Act is really going to encourage electronic commerce.

Telecom Trends

Mark Goldberg

Google calling

View from the street

Ramping up regulatory rhetoric

How we use the internet

Harming electronic commerce efficiencies

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