Last month, I asked if digital issues will factor into the way people vote. We are now 40 days away from Canada’s federal election and looking to see signs of how the major parties will differentiate their approach to substantial issues to drive the digital economy.

What are the key elements that need to be addressed?

• Inclusiveness: Which political parties will recognize the need to get low-income households online? There are solutions for connecting rural and remote regions, but the bigger issue is that of affordability, regardless of geography. As frequent readers know, my personal priority is to ensure all school aged kids have access to a connected home computer.
• Skills development: ICTC – the Information and Communications Technology Council – has launched a project in partnership with Microsoft Canada to develop a national digital talent strategy, seeking to ensure that Canada will have skilled talent to drive innovation and competitiveness, as entrepreneurs or as part of the workforce.
• e-Government: What kinds of efficiencies can be derived from an effective e-Government strategy, including e-Health, distance education and delivery of other government services?
• Digital economic policy: An expert panel should reviewing legislation and policy to ensure consistency with a drive to have Canadians benefit from and lead in the development of a digital economy. Canada is long overdue for an overall Telecom Policy review; the last report was delivered in 2006 [which called for a review to be held every 5 years -we are coming up on 10 years]. The last review pre-dated the AWS spectrum auction [that led to the creation of WIND Mobile, and the mobile operations of Videotron and Eastlink], CASL [Canada’s Anti-Spam Law], copyright reform, digital surveillance, Digital Canada 150 and major changes to policy and regulation emanating from the CRTC [such as Talk TV].

In what other areas are you are you expecting leadership from the parties that hope to form the next government?

As political parties release their digital platforms, what do you want to see?

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[Update: September 9, 5:00 pm]
The Green Party has released its platform [pdf], calling for digital skills upgrades, enshrining net neutrality rules in legislation and repealing the electronic surveillance provisions of Bill C-51.

Is hacking ever justified?

That was the theme of a discussion I had in the car this past weekend on an extended road trip.

The discussion was sparked, in part, from Howard Stern’s reaction to the publication of names from the Ashley Madison data breach. His view was that the information was stolen property and he objected to the way that people were gleefully trading in that information.

Is it the nature of Ashley Madison’s business – promoting adulterous relationships – that makes people more voyeuristic and makes the hacking seem less criminal? What if it was the hacking of medical files for an abortion clinic?

Are there ever circumstances that justify hacking? Should states be engaged in electronic warfare, surveillance, espionage? Under what circumstances could we justify hacking by private citizens? Under what circumstances would it be acceptable to have the state hack its citizens? Or hack another nation? Does it matter if the other nation is a democracy?

Our car ride didn’t settle the issue – we were distracted by the scenery.

What are your thoughts?

In my Twitter feed, Libby Jacobson linked to an interesting read about net neutrality: “Taking a Neutral position: How you spot an arts graduate in a tech debate“. The article by Andrew Orlowski in The Register was subtitled “Sorry lawyers, but the Packet Pixie doesn’t really exist”.

As the article indicates, “Earlier this month Ofcom quietly published a fascinating technical study which helped highlight this: casting light on the difference between the arts grad approach to network management and policy, and the hard numerical reality.” The Ofcom study, “Traffic Management Detection Methods & Tools” [download full report ], raises some important questions about the tools that many industry observers use when complaining about inappropriate traffic management.

It is inherently impossible to detect directly the specific application of differential treatment (other than by inspecting the configuration of network elements). Even when there is such an intention, it may not have any effect, depending on the particular circumstances of load, etc..

The report’s conclusions are important:

The success of packet-based statistically-multiplexed networks such as the Internet is dependent on sharing resources dynamically. This dynamic sharing is ubiquitous, occurring at every WiFi access point, mobile base station and switch/router port. Each of these multiplexing points allocates its resources in response to the instantaneous demand placed upon it, which can typically exceed the available supply.
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Poor performance may have many causes, including the overall network architecture and topology, capacity planning and in-life management. ‘Traffic Management’ is only part of the equation.

Presumably for this reason, traffic management detection (TMD) has been pursued almost entirely from an academic perspective. Given the complexity of the relationship between desired outcomes and actual behaviour, inferring an intention from observed outcomes is effectively impossible. Rather than trying to address this general problem, most TMD starts from assumed intentions mediated by assumed particular TM techniques and then attempts to deduce whether or not certain observations are consistent with such assumptions. However, even positive results do not prove a deliberate intent to introduce bias; given the overall complexity of relating intentions to outcomes, demonstrating a differential outcome does not demonstrate an intent to produce that outcome.

The Ofcom report concludes, “no tool or combination of tools currently available is suitable for effective practical use.”

Orlowski says, “‘Net neutrality’ turns out to be a completely inappropriate metaphor to describe the physical reality of packet networking. Such awareness of the physical reality is what separates network techies and engineers from the typically arts or social-sciences qualified advocates who campaign for ‘net neutrality’.”

The articles are important reading for regulators and advocates on all sides of the debate.

In March, I expressed my disappointment with the architecture that has been deployed in many communities to accommodate text with 9-1-1 service. I wrote, “Regrettably, I am not convinced this is a service that truly meets the needs of the community it is intended to serve.”

There is a risk that we may see similar issues with the mobile industry delivering a solution for emergency alerting. In early June, the CRTC “congratulated the Canadian wireless industry for having developed specifications to deliver emergency alert messages affecting life and property to Canadians through their cellphones.”

However, the congratulatory note seems to indicate that the solution may not offer alerting capabilities to all mobile users in Canada.

There are two different technologies being used for the dissemination of mobile phone alert messages; Cell Broadcast, and Enhanced SMS. Cell Broadcast is an LTE capability that requires the subscriber to have a handset that is both capable and have the feature turned on.

According to the CRTC’s note, “Mobile devices that support the specification will be able to receive and display emergency alert messages in English and French.” This qualifying statement seems to indicate that the emergency alerting architecture may not be available to all mobile handsets.

On the other hand, Enhanced SMS can reach 100% of handsets on day one, including mobile users from outside Canada. The technology can allow alerts to be as focused as a single base station, and the alerting administrator can know exactly how many handsets are in the target area and how many received the alert. Among other benefits, Enhanced SMS can recognize a foreign visitor’s handset and translate the alert message into their native tongue. It can monitor the alert target area for a predefined amount of time and alert any new arrivals into the target zone without re-alerting the original population.

While cell broadcast may be appealing as part of the newest LTE technology deployment, we need to consider backward compatibility to maximize coverage for the alerts. We need to consider those Canadians who do not yet have access to the latest handsets and ensure that they also will be able to receive emergency alert messages. And, we need to consider a more diverse set of language capabilities to serve visitors to Canada’s multi-cultural mosaic.

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[Update: October 28, 2015] The CRTC denied an application by Bruce Power to order Canada’s mobile carriers to immediately implement wireless emergency alerting using available technologies.

However, the Commission recognizes the importance of such a service to help safeguard the lives of Canadians, and therefore announces its intention to launch a full public proceeding into the issue of a wireless public alerting service by the end of the first quarter of 2016.

Roslyn Layton posted an article this morning “Zero rating: Who bears the cost of bans?” that is a worthwhile read.

…those who wish to ban zero rating assert that all mobile plans must be “affordable full access,” and that anything less would be robbing consumers of the complete Internet experience. But this is tantamount to mandating that everyone fly first class.

Clearly, this one-size-fits-all attitude ignores the fact that consumers have widely varying needs and preferences. In the same way that people want to pick and choose their cable channels, they want the same freedom when it comes to their Internet service.

Earlier this year, I wrote about “Intellectual purity of technology over people” and “Connecting the unconnected“, taking a look at a variety of approaches being pursued to provide introductory internet connectivity to people who cannot otherwise afford devices or broadband service.

Should carriers and applications be restricted in exploring business models that increase adoption of digital technology and services? Or, as [Facebook founder, Mark] Zuckerberg asks, will an “extreme definition of net neutrality” put “the intellectual purity of technology above people’s needs?”

A few years ago, in a piece called “Restricting trade“, I wrote “It is difficult to understand how consumers can benefit from restrictions in the types of offers available to them.”

Almost 2 million Canadian households still don’t have a broadband connection and most of them are located in urban centres. As I wrote in May, “Affordable broadband isn’t just a rural issue“.

Canada continues to have a problem with broadband adoption in low-income households, whether urban or rural, despite government programs continuing to define digital adoption as a problem framed in terms of geography, not affordability. Pricing discrimination, including zero-rating, should be considered as we recognize the challenges of broadband affordability among low-income households.

It is going to take creativity from all stakeholders to develop solutions for universal connectivity; why would we limit the options under a guise of “intellectual purity”?