Buried inside the recent Rogers’ screen‑time report is a statistic that merits more attention: 46% of youth smartphone use happens in the bedroom.

Not kitchens. Not living rooms. Not shared family spaces.

Bedrooms.

This single data point should drive a serious conversation about youth screen time, with implications well beyond parenting.

Last month, the United States Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee heard testimony from experts on the impact of screen time on children and young adults. Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath told the Committee that Generation Z – those born roughly between 1997 and 2012 – is the first generation to underperform across every cognitive measure. [pdf, 631 KB]

His testimony showed stagnation or decline in literacy, numeracy, problem solving, creativity, and general cognitive performance among adolescents, correlated with classroom environments undergoing digital transformation.

Over half of our children now use a computer at school for one to four hours each day, and a full quarter spend more than four hours on screens during a typical seven-hour school day. Unfortunately, studies suggest that less than half of this time is spent actually learning, with students off-task for up to 38 minutes of every hour when on classroom devices.

Dr. Cooney Horvath isn’t calling for us to eliminate technology for our kids in schools and at home. “It is a question of aligning educational tools with how human learning actually works.” How do we protect children’s developmental needs? How do we balance technology and innovation with an objective to “maximize the cognitive capacity and long-term flourishing of the next generation”?

Moving from school to home, note that the Rogers study didn’t set out to highlight the shift to the bedroom, but the data demonstrates an interesting phenomenon. Private space connectivity is becoming the default. For years, we’ve talked about “the connected home”; with higher resolution, we can see “the connected bedroom” emerging.

A few forces have converged to make this inevitable: Smartphones are personal, portable, and always on; Wi‑Fi coverage in homes has improved dramatically; Social life for teens increasingly happens online — and privately; Bedrooms are the only space in the house where youths can feel fully autonomous.

The result is a shift from shared digital spaces to private digital ecosystems. If nearly half of youth screen time happens behind closed doors, then coverage, speed, latency, and device prioritization will all be part of the family dynamic. Parents may not articulate it this way, but Wifi performance and the connecting network can shape intra-household behaviour.

Further, bedroom usage complicates parental screen‑time management. Device‑level controls are relatively easy for teens to bypass, app‑level controls can be inconsistent (if available at all), platform‑level controls vary wildly. This is precisely why parents are looking to telcos for help. A teen spending two hours on a phone in the living room is a different scenario than six hours alone in a bedroom. Once a teen is in their room with a smartphone or tablet and a strong wireless signal, parental negotiations become psychological, not technical.

The Rogers Screen Break data hints at this: higher screen time correlates with lower sense of belonging and lower levels of physical activity. Location may be part of that story. If the bedroom is the new digital hub, telcos may need to rethink how home WiFi systems are marketed, how parental controls are structured, how usage dashboards visualize where time is spent, and whether room‑based profiles need to become a feature.

This isn’t necessarily a matter of surveillance. How can service providers give families visibility into patterns they currently can’t see? Youths are using their devices in private spaces because that’s where their social lives, entertainment, and autonomy reside. The question is not how to reverse this trend — it’s how to help families navigate it.

For service providers, this is an opportunity to evolve from being the invisible utility in the background to a partner in managing the modern connected home, or bedroom.

As legislators examine the effects of apps and technology on youth education and social development, parental tools will be an important part of the conversation.

Last night, in his analysis of BCE’s 2025 financial results, Maher Yaghi of Scotiabank asked a question that should be carefully considered in boardrooms of Canadian carriers, and cause serious concerns for national policy makers and regulators: “Why continue to heavily invest in infrastructure?”

Given regulatory prerogatives why continue to heavily invest in infrastructure?
In an environment where 1) the regulator forces operators to rent their infrastructure to competitors both on the wireline and wireless sides at rates set by the same regulator and not on a commercial basis as seen in the US, 2) any investment in network technology made by an operator provides the same advantage to its competitors, and 3) given the high leverage of companies like Rogers, BCE and TELUS, wouldn’t it make more sense for incumbents to materially reduce capex to levels closer to challengers like Quebecor? Obviously this was not the choice made by either BCE nor Rogers when setting their capex guidelines for 2026, but we believe it is a fair question to ask in the current Canadian regulatory context.

All Canadians should ask how the current telecom policy environment could have Scotiabank questioning carriers plans to continue to invest in infrastructure.

Contrast this with Prime Minister Carney’s Budget release: “We’re ushering in a new economic strategy to supercharge growth and give businesses the confidence to invest.”

When Prime Minister Carney launched the new Major Projects Office to fast-track nation-building projects, Energy Minister Hodgson said “At this pivotal moment, we must embrace new ways of doing business in order to build the strongest Canada. We are making good on our promise to move quickly to unlock private sector investment, provide investor certainty…”

There seems to be a serious disconnect.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote “Communications companies are ready to invest billions of dollars of capital, and have the expertise to deploy technologies that power the digital economy.”

At that time, I also wrote that we need regulatory clarity. Not necessarily deregulation. Not necessarily lighter regulation. Just faster, smarter, more predictable regulation.

Through the years, more than 500 of my blog posts have talked about investment. Five and a half years ago, the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry clearly stated that “Canada’s future depends on connectivity”, rejecting a CRTC wholesale rate decision because the Government was “concerned that these rates may undermine investment in high-quality networks.”

Policy makers should be very concerned that the current regulatory framework leads Scotiabank to suggest that it makes more sense for Canada’s biggest telecom carriers to materially reduce capital expenditures.

In a digital economy, isn’t investment in telecom infrastructure among the most important nation-building projects?

Resilience is a popular policy buzzword, but those of us who have designed, built and operated truly resilient digital infrastructure know that we need more than just slogans. I last wrote about network resilience in November, pointing to the need for proactive planning and coordination across all branches of government.

A recent white paper by Georg Serentschy [pdf, 500KB] extends the description of the coordination problem. Networks, data centres, cloud platforms, subsea cables, satellites, and the software layers that bind them together form a single, interdependent system whose resilience determines economic stability, national security, and social continuity.

The global risk environment is intensifying. Climate‑driven disasters, cyberattacks, supply‑chain fragility, and geopolitical events are converging in ways that expose the weaknesses of siloed regulatory models. Canada has already experienced climate‑related outages, ransomware incidents, software failures, and supply‑chain constraints, yet its policy frameworks still treat telecom, cloud, and critical infrastructure as separate domains. The Serentschy paper argues for a systemic approach: resilience must be engineered across the entire lifecycle of digital infrastructure, from design and investment to operation and recovery.

Internationally, regulation is moving toward risk‑based, proportional frameworks such as NIS2 and CER directives in the EU, or sector specific frameworks in the US, such as NIST CSF. These models expand the definition of critical infrastructure, require structured risk assessments, and impose clear reporting and mitigation obligations. Canada currently has no equivalent, and the gap is becoming more visible as digital interdependencies deepen.

Geopolitics is reshaping connectivity at a pace Canada cannot ignore. The EU is pursuing digital sovereignty and industrial autonomy. Hyperscalers and LEO satellite operators have become geopolitical actors in their own right, influencing routing, redundancy, and chokepoints. For a country relying heavily on foreign cloud providers and satellite systems — especially in the North — this creates strategic dependencies that require deliberate policy choices.

The paper’s treatment of digital sovereignty is particularly relevant for Canada. Sovereignty is not autarky; it is controlled interdependence. It means reducing critical dependencies, maintaining regulatory autonomy, and building trusted partnerships while still benefiting from global collaboration. Canada has begun moving in this direction, but without a coherent national doctrine, decisions appear to be reactive and fragmented.

Serentschy stresses the need for measurement, a theme frequently discussed in a number of recent Ivey workshops. Resilience cannot be managed without metrics, yet Canada lacks standardized indicators for restoration times, route diversity, supplier concentration, or dependency on foreign cloud infrastructure. As Serentschy posits, “To be governable, resilience must be measurable.”

The white paper ultimately calls for a shift from resilience rhetoric to resilience engineering. For Canada, we need to understand what that means. Do we have the right regulatory, policy and inter-departmental government frameworks? Are we examining the need for public‑private collaboration? Should we be integrating climate adaptation into network planning? Is digital infrastructure to be treated as a unified ecosystem or a collection of sectors?

Is there an opportunity to learn from the EU and US before the next major outage or geopolitical shock forces action? Digital infrastructure is a strategic asset. To increase the resilience of Canada’s digital infrastructure, all branches of government will need to be involved.

More than a decade ago, I started using the phrase “anti‑social media” to describe the strange behavioural shift that happens when people move from face‑to‑face conversation into the anonymous expanse of the internet. Revisiting those old posts now — some written as far back as 2011 — it’s striking how little has changed, and how much worse some of the underlying dynamics have become.

In one of the earliest pieces, I quoted Aeschylus: “In war, truth is the first casualty.” I added that “the ability to engage in intellectual civil discourse must rank right up there.” That observation came during the usage‑based billing debates, when Twitter was still relatively new and the idea of strangers hurling insults at one another online still felt novel. I wrote then that “adherence to truth and reasoned thinking is clearly not a prerequisite for publishing on Twitter,” a line that unfortunately reads today as understatement rather than critique.

The pattern was already visible. In 4 degrees of impersonal communications, I described how people speak differently depending on the medium: face‑to‑face, over the phone, in email, and finally on the web — the “fourth degree,” where the audience is global and the record is permanent. Paradoxically, the more public the forum, the less care people seem to take with their words. The anonymity of the medium becomes a shield, and sometimes a weapon.

That theme resurfaced again and again. In 2016, I wrote about being accused on Twitter of being “congenitally incapable of accurately representing ppl’s views,” a comment that arrived not after a heated argument but after a simple observation about a witness evading a question at a CRTC hearing. The exchange was a reminder that, as I put it then, “there are no referees on the field in Twitter; no red flags for unsportsmanlike conduct; no personal fouls.” The miracle of modern communications allows us to follow regulatory hearings from halfway around the world, but it also allows complete strangers to lob insults from behind cartoon avatars.

By 2021, the problem had grown more acute. A promoted tweet linking to a post on Mythbusting Canadian telecom generated thousands of views — and a torrent of replies, many of them anonymous, some of them antisemitic. I noted at the time that a surprising number of the trolls used cat images or Soviet‑era icons, as if the choice of avatar were itself a form of camouflage. “Hiding in their mom’s basement behind the safety of a shield of anonymity,” I wrote, “it seems too easy to spread hate and be downright anti‑social on some social media platforms.”

The behaviour wasn’t new, but the scale was. And the emotional toll was real. I wasn’t offering a solution then, and I’m not sure there is a simple one now. But there was value in naming the problem, in acknowledging that something about the architecture of online discourse encourages people to abandon the norms they would follow in any other setting.

One of the most enduring pieces in this thread is Being a mensch, written in 2018. It wasn’t about telecom or regulation at all. It was about decency — about treating people with respect, whether they are waiters, busboys, flight attendants, or strangers online. I wrote that “we led a generation to believe that the internet meant a democratization of interaction with everyone; some trolls help demonstrate the corollary: while they may have ability to have their message broadcast, people still retain the ability to ignore them.” That remains true, but it also feels insufficient in an era when online abuse has become a defining feature of public discourse.

The 2022 post Purveying hate on the public dime brought the issue into sharper focus. It wasn’t just about anonymous trolls anymore. It was about the real‑world consequences of lax enforcement and the uncomfortable fact that public funds were, in some cases, supporting individuals who had been suspended from platforms for their hateful conduct. The question I asked then — “Should the Government of Canada be funding purveyors of hate?” — feels even more relevant today as governments grapple with online safety legislation and the boundaries of free expression.

Looking back across these posts, a through‑line emerges. The technology has evolved, the platforms have changed, and the stakes have grown, but the core issue remains the same: an erosion of civility in digital spaces. Social media promised connection, democratization, and community. Too often, it has delivered the opposite. As Andy Rutledge wrote in his essay Anti‑social Media — a piece I’ve recommended for years — “much of the social media has become a venue for us to practice our most anti‑social behavior and exercise our basest motivations.” That line has aged remarkably well.

The question I asked in 2011 still lingers: Can we rise above anti‑social behaviour in social media or develop better filters to shut out the noise? Fifteen years later, I’m not sure we’re any closer to an answer. But the need for one has only grown.

What I do know is that the values we teach our kids — decency, respect, menschlichkeit — matter just as much online as they do offline. Perhaps more. The technology will continue to evolve. The platforms will come and go. But the responsibility to act like a mensch, even when no one is watching and even when the audience is global, remains unchanged.

Maybe that’s the real antidote to anti‑social media. Not new rules or new algorithms, but old‑fashioned decency, applied consistently, even in the fourth degree of communication.

Rogers’ recent Screen Break initiative has sparked a broader question that the industry hasn’t really confronted head‑on: what role, if any, should telecom service providers play in digital wellbeing?

It’s not a hypothetical. The data shows that 62% of parents and 55% of youth believe telcos should help address screen‑time challenges. That’s a remarkable shift in public expectation — and one that places the industry at an unexpected crossroads.

Australia and France have recently placed age restrictions on the use of social media by youths. Legislators in other countries, including Canada, are looking at similar age limits. At the same time, scientific studies do not appear to support legislative prohibitions. A recent Australian study published by JAMA Pediatrics found “moderate social media use was associated with the best well-being outcomes, while both no use and highest use were associated with poorer well-being.” Last month, Oxford’s Journal of Public Health published a study that found “There was no evidence that time spent on social media or gaming frequency predicted later internalizing symptoms among girls or boys.”

The Globe and Mail reports that Canadian government officials are considering a ban for kids under 14 years old. The scientific evidence doesn’t support legislative prohibitions. Instead, as my doctor says about most things I find enjoyable, the studies show that moderation is key.

For decades, telcos have provided the plumbing for our digital world: essential, foundational, but largely invisible. Digital wellbeing, by contrast, has traditionally been the domain of platforms, educators, and parents. Yet here we are, with families looking for help.

So what does that actually mean? Is there a case for telco involvement?

• Parents are increasingly frustrated by the fragmented nature of device‑level and app‑level controls. A network‑level solution — simple, centralized, and device‑agnostic — is appealing.
• At the same time, public trust in platforms is eroding. Social media companies are not seen as neutral actors in the wellbeing debate. Telcos, by contrast, are viewed as utilities. That neutrality creates permission space.
• The research indicates that the market wants help from their phone company. When two‑thirds of parents want tools, that’s more than a niche. It seems to be an adjacent product category waiting to be defined.

On the other hand, arguments can be made against telco involvement. Network‑level parental controls raise legitimate questions, such as questions about privacy and network neutrality. What data would need to be collected? Who will decide which apps are “healthy”? How does the industry avoid accusations of privileging or penalizing certain apps? Will this lead to regulatory entanglement? Once telcos step into wellbeing, will regulators and policymakers expect them to enforce standards? Or worse, will regulators and policymakers define those standards?

A pragmatic way forward may be for service providers to avoid becoming the arbiters of digital wellbeing. Instead, look for a suite of tools, such as usage dashboards, time‑of‑day parental controls, and household‑level profiles. These would be for parents to opt into, not rules imposed from above. Connectivity with context.

The industry has an opportunity to support families without becoming moral gatekeepers. It would be a focus on empowerment, not enforcement, developing tools respecting privacy, neutrality, and user choice. Can service providers support parents by providing the tools needed to parent responsibly?

Whether or not the industry wants it, digital wellbeing is becoming part of the telecom conversation. The question now is how to develop the category responsibly.