The internet has long been hailed as a means for democratizing the expression of opinions. Everyone has the ability to express themselves on Twitter, on Facebook, on blogs, or in countless chat rooms.

No longer constrained by the availability of a Speaker’s Corner in a public square, on the internet, marginalized voices aren’t subjected to the discretion of a publisher seeking to conserve valuable column inches of newsprint, or limited minutes of airtime. On the internet, you are limited only by the ability to attract eyeballs interested in your perspectives.

And that creates a problem.

In order to attract an audience, people game various systems to improve positioning on search engines, or pay to ‘promote’ their posts on a variety of social media platforms. Because promoter capabilities are seen to be a software feature by the platforms (and not a bug), bad actors have been able to use these tools to spread misinformation. Many subscribers have been unable to differentiate between trusted sources of information and some commentators have charged that this influenced the results of the 2016 elections in the United States.

As a result, democracies around the world are turning their minds to the issue of regulating the kinds of communications being expressed on the internet. Earlier this week, the UK government issued its Online Harms White Paper.

In the wrong hands the internet can be used to spread terrorist and other illegal or harmful content, undermine civil discourse, and abuse or bully other people. Online harms are widespread and can have serious consequences.
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This White Paper therefore puts forward ambitious plans for a new system of accountability and oversight for tech companies, moving far beyond self-regulation. A new regulatory framework for online safety will make clear companies’ responsibilities to keep UK users, particularly children, safer online with the most robust action to counter illegal content and activity.

The UK plan envisions an independent regulator to set safety standards and reporting requirements and armed with enforcement powers.

The UK White Paper has a section on The Duty of Care:

7.4 As indication of their compliance with their overarching duty of care to keep users safe, we envisage that, where relevant, companies in scope will:

• Ensure their relevant terms and conditions meet standards set by the regulator and reflect the codes of practice as appropriate.
• Enforce their own relevant terms and conditions effectively and consistently.
• Prevent known terrorist or CSEA content being made available to users.
• Take prompt, transparent and effective action following user reporting.
• Support law enforcement investigations to bring criminals who break the law online to justice.
• Direct users who have suffered harm to support.
• Regularly review their efforts in tackling harm and adapt their internal processes to drive continuous improvement.

7.5 To help achieve these outcomes, we expect the regulator to develop codes of practice that set out:

• Steps to ensure products and services are safe by design.
• Guidance about how to ensure terms of use are adequate and are understood by users when they sign up to use the service.
• Measures to ensure that reporting processes and processes for moderating content and activity are transparent and effective.
• Steps to ensure harmful content or activity is dealt with rapidly.
• Processes that allow users to appeal the removal of content or other responses, in order to protect users’ rights online.
• Steps to ensure that users who have experienced harm are directed to, and receive, adequate support.
• Steps to monitor, evaluate and improve the effectiveness of their processes.

It is clear that not all illegal content on the internet can be policed using conventional methods. For example, how can we deal with content that hosted in another country that violates our laws?

In its White Paper, the UK is consulting on the need to have some extraordinary tools to deal with the global nature of communications and the “particularly serious nature of some of the harms”.

• Disruption of business activities. In the event of extremely serious breaches, such as a company failing to take action to stop terrorist use of their services, it may be appropriate to force third party companies to withdraw any service they provide that directly or indirectly facilitates access to the services of the first company, such as search results, app stores, or links on social media posts. These measures would need to be compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.
• ISP blocking. Internet Service Provider (ISP) blocking of non-compliant websites or apps – essentially blocking companies’ platforms from being accessible in the UK – could be an enforcement option of last resort. This option would only be considered where a company has committed serious, repeated and egregious violations of the outcome requirements for illegal harms, failing to maintain basic standards after repeated warnings and notices of improvement. Deploying such an option would be a decision for the independent regulator alone. While we recognise that this would have technical limitations, it could have sufficient impact to act as a powerful deterrent. The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) will have this power to address non-compliance when the requirements for age verification on online pornography sites come into force. We are exploring a range of options in this space, from a requirement on ISPs to block websites or apps following notification by the regulator, through to the regulator issuing a list of companies that have committed serious, repeated and egregious violations, which ISPs could choose to block on a voluntary basis.
• Senior management liability. We are exploring possible options to create new liability for individual senior managers. This would mean certain individuals would be held personally accountable in the event of a major breach of the statutory duty of care. This could involve personal liability for civil fines, or could even extend to criminal liability. In financial services, the introduction of the Senior Managers & Certification Regime has driven a culture change in risk management in the sector. Another recent example of government action is establishing corporate offences of failure to prevent the criminal facilitation of tax evasion. Recent changes to the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) provide powers to assign liability to a specific person or position within an organisation. However, this is as yet largely untested. There are a range of options for how this could be applied to companies in scope of the online harms framework, and a number of challenges, such as identifying which roles should be prescribed and whether this can be proportionate for small companies.

The UK White Paper is roughly 100 pages setting out a “vision for online safety, including a new regulatory framework to tackle a broad range of harms”. It appears to be applying serious thought to a serious issue.

There are significant policy issues to be explored. It is difficult to imagine how Canada could conduct a consultation and have a regime in place prior to the next federal election.

Canada’s Minister of Democratic Institutions has been socializing plans for “Safeguarding our Elections” and earlier this week warned “The world’s major social media companies are not doing enough to help Canada combat potential foreign meddling in this October’s elections and the government might have to regulate them”.

Shortly afterwards, Facebook banned a number of Canadian accounts, including one belonging to a former candidate for mayor of Toronto.

If the content of these pages cross the line that defines illegal content, then it is understandable why the pages should be banned.

But what if the content is merely offensive, without being illegal? How do we ensure that actions to block content are consistent with Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees everyone’s “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication”?

In nine weeks, the leading stakeholders in Canada’s communications sector will converge at the International Centre in Toronto for The 2019 Canadian Telecom Summit.

For 3 days (June 3-5), the leadership of the telecom, broadcast & IT industries will converge in Toronto for The 2019 Canadian Telecom Summit. Join your peers, suppliers, policy makers, regulators, customers and competitors in attending the industry’s most important gathering, to discuss the key issues and trends that will impact this critical sector of the economy.

With over 60 speakers, no other event presents as complete a picture of current and expected trends & developments. Join your colleagues for 3 days of spirited discussion and networking.

Now in its 18th year, The Canadian Telecom Summit has grown to become Canada’s most important annual telecommunications & IT event, attracting hundreds of attendees from around the world each year.

No other event presents a complete picture of current and expected trends & developments.

No other event matches The 2019 Canadian Telecom Summit for the depth and breadth of topics covered and issues debated.

Come see why The Canadian Telecom Summit has become THE must-attend conference. With more opportunities than ever to learn, network and do business, if you are involved with or impacted by Canadian telecommunications, broadcasting or information technology, you need to be at The 2019 Canadian Telecom Summit.

Join your colleagues, competitors and customers for 3 days of spirited discussion and networking. Prices increase May 1. Register today for The 2019 Canadian Telecom Summit.

Earlier this month, I wrote about “Maintaining incentives to invest,” asking how a change in regulatory framework might impact investment levels by incumbents and the regional carriers. What are the broader economic impacts of Canada’s mobile industry?

Earlier today, the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) released a report [pdf, 0.5MB] prepared by Nordicity that examines “The Benefits of the Wireless Telecommunications Industry to the Canadian Economy in 2017”. This is the 10th annual version of the report.

Nordicity found:

• In 2017, Canada’s wireless industry contributed $27.5 billion to the Canadian GDP, an increase of 9.1% from $25.21 billion 2016.
• The major contributor to this overall GDP increase was the $1.22 billion increase in the contribution of wireless network operators to the GDP.
• The wireless sector generated 151,550 full-time equivalents (FTE) jobs in 2017, including direct, indirect and induced effects — an increase of 13,500 FTEs or 9.8% from 2016.
• Canadian facilities-based network operators made capital investments in Canada’s wireless infrastructure totaling $2.92 billion in 2017 — an increase of $0.34 billion or 13.2% from 2016.

Robert Ghiz, President & CEO of CWTA, will be speaking at The 2019 Canadian Telecom Summit, taking place June 3-5 in Toronto. Have you registered yet?

There have been many stories about the latest Federal budget [pdf, 6.7MB] that sets out funding to achieve the CRTC’s objective to have broadband access available to all Canadians by the year 2030. I have said before that the CRTC’s December 2016 release of Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2016-496, Modern telecommunications services – The path forward for Canada’s digital economy, was among the most mis-reported decisions to come out of the Commission.

While news coverage of the Budget rightly hailed the $1.7 billion over 13 years to establish a new Universal Broadband Fund, most accounts didn’t look at the actual funding breakdown over the next five years:

• $26M in 2019-2020;
• $162M in 2020-21;
• $220M in 2021-22;
• $216M in 2022-23;
• $92M in 2023-24.

Over the next five years, it is a total of $717M, ramping up as the remaining funds of the Government’s current Connect to Innovate program are disbursed. Of the $1.7B headline funding, a billion dollars, or about 60% is beyond the current budget window.

Indeed, in the coming year (starting April 1), the budget calls for more money to be spent on digital literacy than on the Universal Broadband Fund. The Digital Democracy Project in Canadian Heritage is allocated an additional $7M “for measures to support citizen digital literacy ahead of the 2019 General Election. This initiative will aim to equip Canadians with knowledge of deceptive practices and the tools to navigate the internet and better understand information consumption online more generally.” The new funding supplements an earlier allocation of $7.5M intended to support research and policy development on online disinformation. Canada aims to lead an international initiative to develop principles on how to “strengthen citizen resilience to online disinformation.”

An additional $30M for the next two years is being budgeted for youth training, developing digital skills within the CanCode program and aiming to help one million more young Canadians gain new digital skills.

Increasing broadband adoption has usually been viewed as a challenge for increasing the supply of infrastructure. Last October, I wrote “Is it time to focus on demand?“. At the time, I said:

I’m not just talking about teaching people how to turn on a computer and connect to the internet. We need to do more than teach kids coding as part of our literacy development. How do we teach how the importance of accessing diverse news sources and viewpoints? In a world where a generation has thought of The Late Show as a trusted news source, are we doing enough to invest in teaching how to read and watch with a critical eye?
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It isn’t a matter of having to choose between supply side or demand side stimulation. We need to work on the balance. There is some investment in helping on the demand side of some programs. Maybe we need to work on putting our thumb on the scale a little bit more.

I am especially encouraged by the potential for Canadian leadership through the investment in the Digital Democracy Project. It is refreshing to see the government targeting both supply and demand for digital infrastructure and services.

I was disappointed to read an opinion piece in the weekend Globe and Mail entitled “When it comes to 5G health risks, what we don’t know might hurt us“.

The article plays to the anti-vaccination crowd, presenting data out of context and confusing issues to hype “the worry that the radiation from 5G networks could harm you.” The reader is left with the view that this is new, untested and unregulated technology. It isn’t. There are strict safety codes that regulate the placement of antennas and Canadian carriers operate their equipment far below the levels that have been found to be safe.

The Globe piece starts off identifying what the author, Eric Reguly, calls two ‘reality checks’ for the ‘utopian dreams’ that can be enabled by 5G: security; and, safety. The article then goes on to confuse the security issues with the issue of Huawei’s alleged trade sanctions violations. In fact, there are real security and privacy issues that need to be addressed when billions of devices are connected to networks, but the vast majority of those issues have nothing to do with Huawei. These security and privacy issues would exist even if all of the world’s network equipment was sourced from Canadian suppliers. But we’ll save security and privacy for another day – it will be the subject of a session on June 3 at The 2019 Canadian Telecom Summit.

There is considerable safety information available about radio frequency exposure and there have been numerous scientific studies conducted by serious research bodies. I have written about a number of these in the past and I thought the issue was exhausted years ago. For reference, you can look at these previous posts that talk about some of my responses to junk science and references to more credible research.

• Cell towers aren’t hurting you
• Academic dishonesty
• We need more towers
• Back to school

Also, ISED’s Spectrum management and telecommunications branch has a reference website, “Radiofrequency Energy and Safety” that addresses 5G:

The current Canadian limits already cover the frequency ranges that will be used by 5G devices and antenna installations.

Similar to current wireless devices and installations, 5G devices will need to meet RF exposure requirements before they can be sold in Canada. Antenna systems operators using 5G technology will continue to have the same RF exposure compliance obligations. Furthermore, compliance with RF exposure requirements will continue to be an ongoing obligation.

The failure by the author to present data from Canada’s governmental oversight bodies, including Health Canada’s Safety Code 6 (Limits of Human Exposure to Radiofrequency Electromagnetic Energy in the Frequency Range from 3 kHz to 300 GHz [pdf, 175KB]) is inexcusable. We should be discussing issues associated with 5G deployment in a serious manner.

As you might expect, we will be examining 5G from every angle at The 2019 Canadian Telecom Summit, taking place June 3-5 in Toronto. Have you registered yet?