I was trying to think of when a telecommunications proceeding has had that lengthy a run up period.
The Wireless Code Notice of Consultation (2012-557) was issued October 11, 2012 and the hearing started just 109 days later starting on January 28, 2013.
The second Wireless Code notice (2016-293) was issued July 28, 2016 with its hearing opening 193 days later on February 6, 2017.
The original Long Distance proceeding started off with a mini-proceeding (1990-57) just to determine scope of the bigger proceeding. The preliminary process public notice (1990-57) was issued June 11, 1990 and it resulted in Notice 1990-73, issued August 3, 1990. The hearing itself began 308 days after the original scope proceeding, opening April 15, 1991.
So today’s #CRTC consultation is showing a timetable 11 days longer than the most generous view of the hearing that led to long distance competition in Canada. Has anyone seen a longer lag time between the opening of a CRTC telecom proceeding and the start of the oral hearing phase?
[It is interesting to note that the Long Distance Decision (1992-12) was released two years plus one day after the original public notice.]
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a proposal to create a “Moderation Standards Council” to address how social media platforms deal with and moderate what is termed as “harmful content.” I expressed concern about the proposal to create “an institution for content moderation.”
One bold path forward would be to have the CRTC mandate companies to create this council, a co-regulation approach similar to the Broadcasting Standards Council. The CRTC would mandate the work of the standards council, and set specific binding commitments to improve the transparency and accountability of content moderation.
Besides the fact that the CRTC lacks jurisdiction over social media platforms, we need to consider the very high bar that has rightly been set in defining what forms of speech are illegal, as contrasted with speech that someone merely deems to be offensive.
Social media sites are free to determine their own acceptable use policies that limit the kinds of content that can be posted. Do those policies operate within the bounds of the legal framework in the jurisdiction in which it operating?
A recent news item from France says that “Digital Affairs Minister Mounir Mahjoubi is now trying to purge social media of the racist bile and other hate speech spewed by often faceless users.” It was reported that he “has vowed heavy fines for online platforms that fail to remove hate speech in the 24 hours after it has been reported by users.”
And now, a report in the Globe and Mail says that the House of Commons Ethics Committee has “recommended imposing a requirement on social-media platforms to remove “manifestly illegal content in a timely fashion,” which includes hate speech, harassment and disinformation.”
Canadian ISPs already block certain classes of content that is deemed to be illegal and this without an explicit consent order by the CRTC under Section 36 of the Telecom Act that requires “Except where the Commission approves otherwise, a Canadian carrier shall not control the content or influence the meaning or purpose of telecommunications carried by it for the public.”
Years ago, I wrote a number of pieces dealing with illegal content on the internet. I recall writing about the challenge in public opinion research on the subject.
On a superficial level, if you asked someone on the street if they want their internet service provider to interfere with the content being delivered, I suspect most would immediately answer “No.”
Would the results be the same if the questioner started off by saying: “some ISPs will block spam and viruses from reaching your computer at no extra charge. Is that a valuable service?”
It is pretty clear that there is some content that we want ISPs to block.
Clearly harmful content, like viruses, or fraudulent spam, can be considered to be forms of illegal content to better differentiate it from what I would term the ‘merely offensive’, a term I like to use for content with which I firmly disagree, but regretfully accept as being part of people’s right to be wrong-minded. The challenge is in distinguishing at what point the merely offensive becomes illegal.
Perhaps that listing could serve as a starting point for one particular class of content that is illegal.
What other forms of content can be identifies as having crossed the line? Should Canada be more active monitoring and requiring the removal of illegal content?
Next week, I will be attending a seminar entitled “AI and Health | Just be Patient”, looking at a number of challenges associated with applying artificial intelligence to healthcare.
One of the sessions that caught my eye is called “Give an AI some data and you feed it for a day; teach the AI to get its own data and you feed it for a lifetime”. The session will look at regulating the medical device internet of things (MDIoT) that feed the AI. Other panels will look at the promise of epidemiological research made possible through AI.
The internet of things is connecting billions of objects, enabling real time monitoring with the potential of driving massive improvements in efficiencies in virtually every aspect of our lives. From temperature controls in restaurants, to security systems, to traffic flows, inventory tracking and health care, the opportunities are limitless.
What kind of changes will this require from our communications networks? How do we build the systems to acknowledge and respect privacy rights? As technology companies come under increased scrutiny, are citizens able to trust them with the flood of data from the generic internet of things, let alone the personal medical data from an MDIoT?
When we teach artificial intelligence engines to get data, what ethical principles need to be established to guide the systems development?
A late evening Amber Alert on Thursday of last week triggered online discussion and calls to 9-1-1 emergency service bureaus, arguing about the appropriateness of the use of the National Public Alert System.
Many commentators have written articles to admonish those who complained about being awoken by the alert system (such as here and here).
There is little doubt that the circumstances warranted the use of the Public Alert system. It was completely wrong to tie up resources at 9-1-1 emergency service bureaus to complain about interrupted sleep. It is completely reasonable to ask if there can be improvements in the manner in which it was deployed.
I mused on Friday about whether Canada should have a multi-agency “formal process to review each use of the National Public Alert System, to help develop best practices”:
To what extent do we need a formal process to review each use of the National Public Alert System, to help develop best practices?
Should this be shared committee with public safety and communications professionals among others?#CRTC#CDNpoli
For example, according to the Toronto Star, Peel Regional Police asked the Ontario Provincial Police to issue the alert earlier in the evening, but the alert didn’t go out until after 11pm. Can steps to be taken to improve this time lag? Apparently last week’s message was received by some people in Manitoba. Should it have been distributed to adjacent provinces? Was it translated into French?
I don’t question that the system was deployed in this instance. Shouldn’t we continually be examining how the system was deployed, to ensure that it will always be used in the best possible manner?
Does Huawei represent a national security threat or is its success driving political efforts to stave off a highly visible symbol of the potential of China’s nascent economy?
For the past few years, I have entitled my year end wrap up with a line from Joni Mitchell’s Circle Game. Today, I am using another of her lyrics, from Big Yellow Taxi. Let me start with a bit of a warning. My son likes my blog posts that reminisce about the olden days. So I may take a little time getting to the point in today’s post. Here is the ‘too long; didn’t read’ extract: North America lost its telecom giants and the major suppliers are all based off-shore. “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”
I got into the telecom business just about 40 years ago, working as a summer management intern between my undergrad and graduate studies. I had landed a job at “the Bell” as it was known.
That was an interesting time of transition for the sector in Canada. The first interconnection decision was released, CRTC 79-11, enabling limited forms of competition. The first DMS-100 digital switches were rolling off the assembly lines from Northern Telecom (which had just recently been renamed from Northern Electric). Northern Telecom (known widely as ‘Nortel’ even before it formally changed its name) was still majority owned by Bell Canada, and it was competing against its former US parent, Western Electric, which was still a part of AT&T. I remember feeling in those days that the Nortel salesman was more of an order taker than an actual sales person. We only had one supplier at that time. Indeed, I recall causing a bit of a stir after Bell bought an independent phone company operating in the Kingston area that had a couple fairly new Automatic Electric C1-EAX switches, built by a Nortel competitor. The central office engineer wanted to pay Nortel to scrap the equipment when installing replacement digital switches. He was forced to put the equipment on the second-hand market when I offered to personally buy the switches for $5 each under the company’s employee purchase of surplus equipment program. Sorry, I digressed – we’ll save that story for another day. The bottom line: the close symbiotic relationship virtually guaranteed Nortel a market for its emerging innovations and enabled Bell to shape the development of products.*
Fast forward to the mid-80’s and I spent time at Bell Labs in New Jersey, primarily working on new capabilities for AT&T Communications, the post-divestiture long distance company. However, we also did some systems engineering work with our colleagues at Western Electric, which was still part of AT&T at the time. I loved that job, working with incredibly bright people at a legendary institution and I got to lead work on a some significant projects. It would be another decade before AT&T spun out the equipment business to what became Lucent, which later merged with Alcatel and before becoming part of Nokia.
Without a doubt, both companies, Nortel and Western Electric (Lucent), delivered world leading innovations, arguably thanks in part to the tight corporate linkages with having an operating services company as a parent. To what extent were Nortel and Lucent victims of their growth and independence, unable to survive without their anchor customers? These are the kinds of questions that might be interesting academic research projects.
Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
There is no longer a “home town” champion supplying the major network elements in North America’s communications networks. In the end, North American communications service providers are dependent on foreign suppliers for much of the network infrastructure. That said, all of the major suppliers, including Huawei, have made substantial research and development investments in Canada, with labs and significant levels of funding toward university partnerships. There are large numbers of Canadians – employees and students – involved in all of the major suppliers.
Communications gear features sophisticated software so complex that one must question if it is possible to completely test performance, let alone detect and isolate malignant code. With distributed architectures inherent in 5G networks, to what extent have we become dependent ultimately on trust in our networks’ suppliers?
The government has been slow to respond to pressures seeking to restrict Canadian carriers from deploying Chinese technology, stating that it “is a serious decision and we will make it in a serious and conscientious way.”
Indeed, it is a very serious decision. Removing any supplier from the marketplace could raise carrier costs (and consumer prices) and reduce access to innovative features. Huawei’s annual global revenues, in the order of US$100B are nearly double the combined revenues for Nokia and Ericsson.
Statements by the US President must give rise to questions about whether security concerns are being intermingled with industrial and trade policy. Are we reminiscing about the good old days in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, when domestic icons like Nortel and Lucent were among the gold standards in building the foundations for our information age? That time is gone.
Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
How do we measure trust in our network suppliers? Has any other communications equipment supplier undergone the rigorous level of security scrutiny as Huawei? In a country like Canada, with our commitment to diversity and principles over politics, how do we ensure that we objectively quantify trust, free of xenophobia and racism?
As an aside, I actually built up a Nortel pension when I was with Bell Canada International based in the US, and then added to it while working for Bell Northern Research. The US Government backstopped that pension plan when Nortel went under. My understanding is that I will be eligible for enough to buy a grande latte each month in just a few more years.
