Back in the 1980’s, I recall attending a presentation on Affirmative Action delivered by Mo Iwama, an executive at AT&T Bell Labs who said that increased diversity was not only the right thing to do, it would be good for all of us. He explained that in order to do a good job serving a diverse population, it made sense to have diversity in all parts of the company, from line R&D and engineering through to sales and in all levels of the organization.

More than thirty years ago, the industry was already taking steps to transform itself. At the time, we set up liaison programs with high schools in inner cities to help increase the pool of students who would enter Science, Technology, Engineering and Math programs. It was viewed as a long term investment.

Thirty years later, there is still much more work to be done.

In April, the CRTC Chair admonished a number of companies that put forward witness panels that were composed entirely of men.

11273. Today there was a report issued by Employment and Social Development Canada that found the proportion of women in federally regulated companies has dropped from 46 percent to 41 percent in the past 20 years. And since we’ve started this hearing we’ve faced panels like your own entirely of men. As I say, I’m not picking on you. You’re not alone in this. But, you know, and where there have been women on the panels in these telecom proceedings, they don’t have speaking roles.
11274. Now I gave a short speech last year at the Canadian Women and Communications and Technology gala that, you know, applauds the work of women in that sector. And I noted that in the fall of 2014 we held 3 major hearings. A hundred and twenty-five (125) women appeared at that hearing — in those 3 hearings.
11275. And we calculated that of the 1.8 million words spoken, only 163,000 words were spoken by women sitting at the witness table. Fourteen (14) percent.
11276. And I called on everyone, including the CRTC, but speaking to government, to the industry and even ourselves, that we can do better.
11277. On this panel, all the women appointed by the government as commissioners are here. The CRTC, we strive to make sure that we have staff that — yeah, there’s unfortunately only two — that staff balance — is balanced from a gender perspective.
11278. In any event, I know there are women in your organizations. So I repeat the call. We can do better.

So, it was surprising that the CRTC’s panel for the BDU License Renewal hearing was composed entirely of white men, especially when juxtaposed against the composition of the panels appearing before the CRTC.

The CRTC has a number of vacancies. It is an agency that has a mandate to ensure the broadcasting system “reflects Canadian attitudes, opinions, ideas, values and artistic creativity, by displaying Canadian talent in entertainment programming and by offering information and analysis concerning Canada and other countries from a Canadian point of view”.

Given the composition of the Trudeau Cabinet, reflecting ethnic diversity and balanced from a gender perspective, we might expect new appointments to help the Commission be a better reflection of Canada’s rich multi-cultural character. Just last November, the Prime Minister said “Canadians understand that diversity is our strength. We know that Canada has succeeded—culturally, politically, economically—because of our diversity, not in spite of it.”

Increased diversity at the CRTC isn’t just the right thing to do. It will be good for all of us.

As kids head back to school next week, many will be walking with a new smartphone.

And that means they won’t be as attentive as they should be to automobile traffic, according to researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Their research found that a child’s ability to safely cross the street is hindered more during a cellphone conversation than an adult’s. The study, “Cell phone conversations and child pedestrian’s crossing behavior; a simulator study,” is in the November 2016 issue of “Safety Science.”

According to the researchers, although many children have been carrying cell phones for a number of years, the effect that cell phone conversations can have on children’s crossing behavior had not been thoroughly examined previously. As might be expected, the researchers found “cell phone conversations jeopardize pedestrians’ ability to safely cross the road.”

With the end of summer vacation, drivers need to take special care.

We used to warn drivers of the potential for kids to be darting onto the road running after a ball. Now we have video games, messaging and parents calling to “check in”, each serving as distractions for kids heading to and from school.

It isn’t enough to avoid using our phones while driving; be sure to watch out for pedestrians, especially children, who may forget to watch out for you.

Earlier this week, I wrote about the importance of being exposed to sufficient diversity of views. That post was inspired by Nick Cohen’s article last weekend in The Guardian, which asked “who wants to live their life with only the echo of their own voice for company?”

I like reading a diverse range viewpoints and in particular, I have been known to read dissenting opinions in regulatory decisions.

Last week, FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai issued a dissenting statement, following a review of media cross-ownership. It is an entertaining read, regardless of where you stand on the issue.

Commissioner Pai states:

If I were to detail all of this Order’s deficiencies, my dissenting statement would be almost as long as the Order itself (161 pages). In the interest of space, I’ll focus on what I consider to be the Order’s most problematic aspects.

His dissent runs 14 pages, taking strong issue with the concept of media concentration in an internet age (an issue frequently raised in Canada as well).

But the larger problem with the Commission’s conclusion is that it ignores the realities of the modern media marketplace. This isn’t the 1970s anymore. Most Americans don’t wait for the morning newspaper or the 11:00 PM newscast to learn what’s going on around the globe or at home. That world set sail with The Love Boat. Today, most Americans get the information they want when they want it by going online and scouring a wide variety of sources, including digital-only news outlets and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. When it comes to news, we can now choose from an amazingly diverse array of options. Last year, for example, Pew Research Study counted 143 news providers in Denver alone.

When I saw Commissioner Pai’s statement, I observed:

We used to have a history of great dissent in the CRTC. For example, in 2008, I wrote about a pair of dissents associated with a CRTC review of the broadcast distribution framework. Michel Morin’s dissenting view was 45 pages of the total 141 page decision.

In 2007, I described a well written dissent written by Barbara Cram associated with an application to review and vary an earlier decision.

Stuart Langford wrote his dissents colourfully, as I observed in 2007.

The Majority decision invites a Robin Hood approach to assessing user fees. Taken to its logical conclusion it could result in provincial schemes that take from the rich and give to provincial coffers not as directly as the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest once redistributed wealth, but just as surely. Perhaps a more appropriate analogy would be to the Sheriff of Nottingham rather than Robin of Locksley. Either way, it strikes me as a formula for anything but regulatory fairness.

As I observed in 2008, dissenting opinions “provide a fascinating peek at what some of the debates must have been during the decision making process.”

In 2012, there must have been fascinating discussions at the CRTC when the Commission got rid of the Local Programming Improvement Fund. The majority decision, which ran just 22 paragraphs, spawned 3 dissenting opinions and a concurring statement. One of the dissents was three times the length of the main decision.

More recently, there have been dissenting opinions that the CRTC has failed to publish at the same time as the majority decision. Hopefully, the Commission has fixed its processes that led to such errors.

Dissenting views are important – perhaps none so important as Justice Brandeis in Olmstead v. United States, a case that looked at whether warrants were required prior to a wiretap. The majority said no; Brandeis wrote:

If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means—to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal—would bring terrible retribution.

An article in The Atlantic, “In Praise of Dissent,” observed that the US Supreme Court “justices seem to have lost even the energy to argue with each other”, with few dissents appearing in recent decisions.

Colourful dissenting views in regulatory decisions provide insight into enthusiastic discussions among the Commissioners, passionately debating the issues raised by parties.

After all, “who wants to live their life with only the echo of their own voice for company?”

A few years ago, Nick Carr wrote “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in The Atlantic. Carr found the assumption unsettling that we would be better off “if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence.”

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

I was reminded of Carr’s 2008 article by the opening sentence in a weekend piece in The Guardian by Nick Cohen that asks “Did better broadband make Americans more partisan?” Cohen writes “It is easy to suspect that the web makes us stupid” but he also observes “Suspecting the web has made us stupid is not the same as proving it.”

The article refers to a research paper [by Yphtach Lelkes, Gaurav Sood and Shanto Iyengar] published last December in the American Journal of Political Science, “The Hostile Audience: The Effect of Access to Broadband Internet on Partisan Affect.” That paper found “that access to broadband Internet boosts partisans’ consumption of partisan media, a likely cause of increased polarization.”

As a result, Cohen writes:

Greater use of the web ensured that an admirer of Jon Stewart would think that conservatives were not just mistaken but stupid, or a viewer of Fox News would work on the assumption that liberals were wicked. Both sides could dismiss uncomfortable facts as lies. Both sides allowed their politics to become so bound up with their identity, opposing arguments felt almost as if they were physical assaults.

Cohen asks us to consider “a world where people are so alienated from each other they cannot accept the good faith of an opponent who produces a discomforting argument.”

In “Fear and Loathing Across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization” [Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood], the authors “document the scope and consequences of affective polarization of partisans using implicit, explicit and behavioral indicators,” finding:

Partisans discriminate against opposing partisans, and do so to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race. We note that the willingness of partisans to display open animus for opposing partisans can be attributed to the absence of norms governing the expression of negative sentiment and that increased partisan affect provides an incentive for elites to engage in confrontation rather than cooperation.

In the absence of opposing viewpoints, partisanship continues to be amplified. People watch just the programs that serve up the same viewpoints; read articles from sources that reinforce the opinions already held. Cohen’s article in the Guardian asks that legislation be introduced such that Facebook and others be prohibited from using “algorithms to deliver news that users want to hear, rather than need to hear.”

Perhaps recognizing the impossibility (and we might argue the impropriety of such legislation), Cohen concludes with what we might consider to be an important element of improved digital literacy:

More important would be a cultural reaction against the impoverishment so many supporters of the populist movements exhibit. Their inability to argue, their denial of hard evidence, their certainties, and their fanatical denunciations of sellouts, traitors and apostates speak of men and women whose souls have withered along with their minds.

They should be made to face their own inadequacies, and asked politely but repeatedly: who wants to live their life with only the echo of their own voice for company?

Are our students being exposed to sufficient diversity of views?

How do we encourage reading alternate perspectives, consideration of dissenting viewpoints, and engaging in cooperative dialog?

As Canada seeks to develop an innovation agenda, a new report [pdf, 6MB] from the MacDonald Laurier Institute warns Canada to avoid Europe’s state-imposed mandates and top-down regulations that have contributed to underinvestment and poor network quality.

The report, “Winners and Losers in the Global Race for Ultra-Fast Broadband: A cautionary tale from Europe,” was authored by Andrea Renda, who is Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Regulatory Policy Unit at CEPS, the Centre for European Policy Studies. He is also a Senior Fellow at Duke University’s Rethinking Regulation Program, based at the Kenan Institute for Ethics.

MacDonald Laurier Institute says the report “demonstrates Europe’s policy of mandatory network sharing has discouraged investment in the continent’s networks and diminished the positive economic benefits that high-quality networks can enable.”

For example, fibre to the premises coverage is approximately double in the US compared to Europe (23 percent versus 12 percent); and overall next generation access coverage reaches 82 percent in the United States versus 54 percent in Europe. Furthermore, telecommunications revenues are dramatically higher in Australia, the US, Switzerland, Japan, Canada, Iceland, and Norway than in EU nations, which all fall below the OECD average.

It warns that “continuing down the European path could lead to a substantial price to pay in terms of growth and jobs.”

As indicated by Renda’s report, the development of broadband communications creates both challenges and opportunities for policy-makers.

• How does public policy create the conditions for high-quality broadband infrastructure?
• How does it ensure market competition and protect consumer interests?
• And to what extent are these objectives in conflict?

Renda says the tension of these conflicting objectives resulted in many governments mandating “network sharing” where the owners of broadband infrastructure are required to grant access to competitors, particularly in the “narrowband” era of lower capacity networks.

But today’s ultra-fast broadband has become an information superhighway on which users can find all sorts of products and services that run “on top of” the network (so-called “over-the-top” services such as Netflix). These services are what users want when they connect to the broadband network; having 10 alternative identical ways to reach the same slow Internet is not going to add a lot of value to end users, especially if competition stifles incentives to deploy better networks, or to ultimately create products or services that highly depend on network speed.

The study investigates the policies most likely to create conditions for a jurisdiction to win the race for leadership in global ultra-broadband connectivity, with significant economic implications. It observes that the experience from Japan and South Korea suggests “a light regulatory touch can create the conditions for private investment in broadband networks and in turn help to produce the digital networks that can serve as the foundation for innovation, digital adoption, and economic growth.”

On the other hand, the study observes that the European Union has largely applied heavier-handed regulation (originally crafted for the age of legacy copper networks), with very different results. “The main takeaway is that Europe’s policy of mandatory network sharing has discouraged investment in the continent’s networks and diminished the positive economic benefits that high-quality networks can enable.”

While the report discusses the impact of the EU regulatory approach on competition, innovation, and investment with exclusive reference to wireline telecommunications, the author states “many of the findings apply also to wireless.”

“The lesson for the Trudeau government is that heavy-handed telecommunications regulations such as mandatory network sharing can lead to underinvestment in digital networks and in turn undermine its broader goals with regard to innovation and entrepreneurship.”