Over the past couple of years, I have been more assertive in defending my identity.

I am proudly a Jew (in case you didn’t already know). I have never hidden that fact. In university, I refused to write exams scheduled on Jewish holy days or on the Jewish Sabbath (Friday evenings and Saturdays). On my first day of work at Bell-Northern Research in early September in the late 80’s, I informed my boss that I would be missing work in a few weeks for the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. He responded that I wouldn’t have earned any vacation time by then. I made it clear that I wasn’t asking for time off. I wasn’t going to be at work those days; he and HR could figure out how to code it.

In the early 90’s, the CRTC was running behind schedule during a multi-week hearing. The Commission wanted to have sessions on Saturdays in order to catch up. I refused to testify on a Saturday. My boss pressured me, reminding me that I wasn’t “that” religious. I replied saying it is one thing for me to choose to do some work on Saturdays, but it is a different matter for my government to require me to work on my Sabbath. I held firm. Instead, the hearing ran later each day. An observant Jewish member of one of our competitors came up to me and thanked me for holding my ground.

And, that is why I am using this platform to write this post.

When I am publicly defending my identity, I am also standing up for those who don’t have a public persona. I get to raise my voice on social media, and often, some like-minded followers will amplify that message well beyond my customary reach. It is a network benefit.

Back when the Laith Marouf affair was percolating, the story gained traction when Jonathan Kay raised the profile of my complaints. It is for that reason that I believe it is important to write to you.

Followers of this website know that I frequently travel to Israel. Israel is an intrinsic part of my Jewish identity. When Jews pray, we face toward Jerusalem. Our prayers and our bible contain references to Israel. Major Jewish festivals are tied to agrarian timetables and practices in Israel. I am not an Israeli citizen, but I have family who are.

The events of October 7, 2023 have been deeply troubling to me. The response – or more correctly, the lack of moral leadership – by Canadian officials has been disturbing. The sacking of British Columbia’s NDP cabinet member Selina Robinson demonstrates a pervasive rot – or latent antisemitism – among many political leaders.

I am tired of politicians thinking that the way to respond to antisemitic acts is to write on Twitter that “This is not who we are” or claim that “Hatred and violence against Jewish communities have no place in Canada.”. Condemnations on social media are no match for intimidation by throngs calling “Death to the Jews”. Tweets are ineffective against firebombings and shots fired at synagogues and Jewish community centres.

In defending freedom of expression, I have frequently quoted Aaron Sorkin’s brilliant speech from The American President. “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.”

Still, there are limits to those speech rights. As CIJA said in its statement yesterday, “We cannot allow mob-driven demonstrations to obstruct our right to participate fully in society.”

Which brings me to how you fit in to help in defending my identity. In resigning from the NDP caucus, Ms. Robinson wrote, “I don’t need your hugs and your emojis. What my community needs however, is for you to stand up to antisemitism.”

Call out hate when you see it online. Tell your elected officials that antisemitism isn’t just a problem for Canada’s Jews. Demand action.

And every once in a while, I’d be OK with a hug.

Consequences of regulatory overreach are discussed in a recent Truth on the Market blog post. Lessons in Regulatory Humility Following the DMA Implementation resonated with me, even before Canada’s Online Harms Act was tabled in the legislature. Peter Menzies and Michael Geist each write about the extreme overreach in Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act.

In response to regulatory overreach, I have been writing about the need for greater humility for almost as long as this blog has been around. Last year, I wrote “Politicians looking to score points with intervention in the digital marketplace should carefully reflect on whether new laws are actually needed.” Seven years ago, I observed “Canada was among the first regulators to set out a light-touch approach to internet regulation” (in 1999).

The Truth in Markets post warns about unintended consequences arising from the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).

To comply with the DMA, digital platforms will have to adapt their business models, governance, and even their “digital architecture,” which will affect how they provide services and monetize their assets. These changes will be felt not only by the platforms themselves, but also by the services that run on them (whether called “business users” or “complementors”) and by consumers, all of whom will be forced to grapple with new risks or a potential reduction in quality.

Canadians have experienced platforms reducing the quality of user experience in response to government legislation. Facebook removed news from Canadian feeds because of the high costs associated with compliance with the Online News Act.

Apple has warned that aspects of the DMA creates new risks for users. “The new options for processing payments and downloading apps on iOS open new avenues for malware, fraud and scams, illicit and harmful content, and other privacy and security threats.”

The reaction to some of the gatekeepers’ announcements regarding their DMA-compliance plans shows how we could quickly be thrown into a downward spiral in which regulations beget more regulations. Once the first layer of regulations fail to yield the desired results, politicians, consumers, and business users demand more regulation. This leads, in the end, to more heavy-handed rules like the aforementioned price controls or structural separations.

Regulations beget more regulation. Former CRTC Vice-chair Peter Menzies warns about the Province of Quebec seeking to create its own streaming rules. Will another layer of regulations increase the availability of French language content? Mr. Menzies warns, “there is a widely held view that should the regulatory burden be viewed as overly cumbersome, many smaller streaming companies might make their services unavailable in Canada. And it’s not entirely out of the question that some large companies could follow suit.”

Legislation and regulations are almost always designed with aspirational objectives. Unfortunately, there is often insufficient analysis of the consequences of regulatory overreach. Truth on the Markets warns about jurisdictions rushing to be first with digital market legislation. “Countries that take their time, however, to study markets, perform proper regulatory impact analysis, and enact a serious notice-and comment-process, will be those most able to learn from the experience of other regulators and markets. These regulatory impact analyses should, of course, also consider the possibility that the regulation in question may not be necessary at all”.

As I have written before, “we need to explore policies for the digital economy with the thinking of a chess master”. There is a real need to think at least three or four moves ahead.

Parliamentarians on the Standing Committee on Industry and Technology (INDU) have mustered faux outrage in their undertaking of a study on “Accessibility and Affordability of Wireless and Broadband Services in Canada”.

So far, the Committee has questioned witnesses from Quebecor / Videotron, the Competition Bureau, the CRTC, Bell, Rogers and TELUS. The Quebecor / Videotron panel was led by CEO PK Peladeau, but the Committee wanted the CEOs of the other major carriers to appear before them. Instead, the designated witnesses were a Chief Financial Officer, the President of the Wireless business unit, and the Executive Vice President of legal and regulatory affairs.

In other words, the carriers were represented by the kinds of experts equipped to answer questions related to the study. That was clearly the approach used by the Competition Bureau and the CRTC. Both agencies sent representatives responsible for areas expected to be the focus of the study. The CRTC Chair didn’t appear; the Commissioner of the Competition Bureau wasn’t there. No summons to appear were issued to the leaders of the agencies.

But the INDU members displayed faux outrage at the corporate CEOs who sent mere mortals to actually respond to questions, when the parliamentarians wanted their faces, if not their heads.

A couple years ago I wrote, “Giving elected officials the chance to ask questions of regulators is an important part of our democratic process. It can be very informative when used wisely. Unfortunately, the opportunity is wasted if Committee members are unprepared or do not have a solid understanding of the industries they are overseeing.”

The same can be said when MPs are armed with flawed or seriously outdated information. Rather than relying on official government data from ISED, the CRTC, or Statistics Canada, MPs were citing deeply flawed and widely discredited reports from Rewheel Research to mistakenly charge that Canadian mobile prices are the highest in the world. Recall, the International Center for Law and Economics referred to Rewheel as a “careless mish-mash of data points from which no reliable conclusions can be drawn.”

It simply isn’t true that Canadian prices are the highest in the world. Not by a long shot. Last November I wrote about a PwC study laying out a fact-based narrative on telecom affordability in Canada, painting a very different picture from the conventional wisdom.

MPs acknowledged that Canadian prices are coming down (as you have been reading here), but claimed prices are falling slower than in peer markets. That is also not true. In fact, prices have been going up in the US, the UK, and Australia (as well as many other countries).

MPs confused ARPU (a proxy for monthly bills), with prices – a mistake about which I write too frequently.

Witnesses have delivered information that is actually relevant to the study. That Canadian government fees for spectrum are the highest in the world, adding $5 per month in extra cost to mobile phone bills. That capital intensity by Canadian carriers is among the world’s highest, delivering high quality service across a challenging geography. That prices have fallen more than 15% in the past 12 months, roughly 50% in the past 5 years, despite price increases of close to 20% over the past 5 years in the overall Canadian economy. That the industry has created (and fully funded) targeted affordability programs to deliver home internet, mobile services, and devices to vulnerable communities.

The information that demonstrates the “Accessibility and Affordability of Wireless and Broadband Services in Canada” is available to members of INDU. Hopefully, we will see the MPs shed their faux outrage and open their minds to the answers being shared at the next meeting.

Yesterday, the CRTC released its annual industry monitoring report for the communications sector. Some of you may be thinking, “two months after year end is pretty good timing.” And it would be heroic timing if indeed the CRTC was reporting on 2023 industry data.

Unfortunately, the report was “Annual highlights of the telecommunications sector 2022” [also available as pdf, 910KB]. That’s right, 2022 data getting released 14 months after year-end.

Among the interesting data in the report is the official tally of Canadian telecommunications industry revenues: $57.2B. As noted by the CRTC, this means that foreign ownership restrictions (under Section 16 of the Telecom Act) only apply to carriers with telecommunications revenues exceeding 10% of that total (ie. $5.7B). In practice, this means Bell, Rogers and TELUS remain the only carriers that must be Canadian owned and controlled.

This was the 23rd edition of the CRTC’s communications industry monitoring reports. Back in the summer of 2000, Cabinet issued Order-in-Council 2000-1053:

Order requiring the CANADIAN RADIO-TELEVISION AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION to report to the Governor in Council, once a year for the next five years, on the status of competition in Canadian telecommunications markets and on the deployment and accessibility of advanced telecommunications infrastructure and services in urban and rural areas in all regions of Canada, and to submit its first report no later than September 28, 2001.

Beating the deadline by one day, on September 27, 2001, the CRTC issued its first annual Communications Monitoring Report [pdf, 8.9MB] covering data from the year 2000.

Following the first 5 years that were issued in response to the Cabinet directive, the CRTC continued publishing annual data. I started blogging in 2006 and I have included looks at the reports ever since.

Over time, the annual publication was revised to embed fewer tables, instead accompanying the text with a rich assortment of Open Data downloadable spreadsheets. The CRTC boasts over 400 datasets are available, many of them updated more frequently than once per year. A change log is maintained to help identify updates.

In 2021, the Commission rebranded the statistics as Communications Market Reports. The Market Reports are divided under 5 headings:

• High-speed broadband
• Mobile wireless
• Broadcasting
• Economic indicators
• Other telecom services

These online tables are more current than the annual summary, but there is much room for more timeliness. My records show that 2008 annual data was published in August 2009. The data for 2009 and 2010 were published in July of the subsequent year. Dates started to slide to September 2012 for 2011 data, then November 2017 for 2016 data. And now, the 2022 data took until the very end of February 2024, fourteen months after year-end.

Looking back over nearly a quarter-century of industry monitoring reports, isn’t it reasonable to have expected improvements in delivery over time? Sure, we have more detailed data and open access to some of the data, but collaboration tools should have enabled reporting speeds to improve dramatically.

Notably, as of last week, most public companies have already delivered official financial reports for year-end 2023.

Where do you go for timely telecommunications industry monitoring reports?

Is it time to tame “technology authoritarianism”?

Is that even possible?

Yesterday, the Canadian government introduced its long-promised Online Harms Act, with the promise of a focus on protecting children and youth from the “dangers of the internet”. I’ll have more on some of the specifics as the text of the legislation works its way through committee review.

From some of the earliest days of this blog, I have been writing about “Taming the wild west” of what I called the anarchy of the internet. At the time, I had a particular concern with the “fine balance between the right to free speech and the right of individuals not to be the objects of hate and violent speech”.

A recent article in The Atlantic caught my eye. In “The Rise of Technoauthoritarianism”, Adrienne LaFrance claims the technocrats of Silicon Valley are “leading an antidemocratic, illiberal movement” and government intervention is required.

She writes that she long believed that regulation was unnecessary, “in part because I was not (and am still not) convinced that the government can do so without itself causing harm… I’d much prefer to see market competition as a force for technological improvement and the betterment of society.”

in recent years, it has become clear that regulation is needed, not least because the rise of technocracy proves that Silicon Valley’s leaders simply will not act in the public’s best interest. Much should be done to protect children from the hazards of social media, and to break up monopolies and oligopolies that damage society, and more. At the same time, I believe that regulation alone will not be enough to meaningfully address the cultural rot that the new technocrats are spreading.

Why the epipheny? Why can’t market forces provide sufficient discipline? LaFrance reminds us that Silicon Valley “attracts many immensely talented people” (including half of my kids), working to do good.

Even the most deleterious companies have built some wonderful tools. But these tools, at scale, are also systems of manipulation and control. They promise community but sow division; claim to champion truth but spread lies; wrap themselves in concepts such as empowerment and liberty but surveil us relentlessly.

Read the full article.

I don’t agree with every claim made by LaFrance, but it is a well written, thought provoking piece. “Many Americans fret — rightfully — about the rising authoritarianism among MAGA Republicans, but they risk ignoring another ascendant force for illiberalism: the tantrum-prone and immensely powerful kings of tech.

Two weeks ago, US Congress summoned the CEOs of leading technology firms to discuss “Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis.” Pressured under questioning, at one point Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized to victims. “No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered.”

Although Canada has not yet introduced its long-promised Online Harms legislation, it has passed two of the bills promised under its Digital Charter:

• C-11: “The Online Streaming Act modernizes the Broadcasting Act and helps ensure Canadian stories and music are widely available on streaming platforms to the benefit of future generations of artists and creators in Canada.”
• C-18: “The Online News Act aims to ensure that dominant platforms compensate news businesses when their content is made available on their services.”

But, as I asked last Fall, are we “Losing sight of the target”.

And, if indeed it is time to tame “technology authoritarianism”, how do we tame them?