The CRTC is acknowledging that it is having a tough time keeping up with ‘miscreants’ placing unwanted telemarketing calls to Canadians.

In its latest report to Industry Minister James Moore on the operation of the National Do Not Call List, the CRTC identifies “Challenges and Opportunities.” The first “opportunity” listed deals with caller identification spoofing:

“A major challenge has emerged in the form of caller identification (ID) “spoofing,” which is the falsification of the phone number that appears on consumers’ caller ID displays.”

Caller ID spoofing is an important capability that was built into the phone standards to enable people to work from one location but show a different caller identification. This way, for example, a call centre can show the toll-free call back information for the underlying client, not the agent, who may be located half way around the world. Placing such information into the caller ID field is actually a requirement in the CRTC’s telemarketing rules.

But we have all been victims of caller ID spoofing that is done for less than honourable purposes. In some cases, the CRTC has found that the ‘miscreant’ operators have used the call identification of legitimate businesses to make their unwanted calls. In one such case, more than 30,000 calls per day were being made, falsely being represented as being originated by a well known, legitimate Canadian firm.

The CRTC joined an international inter-agency collective to combat caller ID spoofing. The Commission has acknowledged that “It is extremely challenging to enforce the Rules in such circumstances given the difficulty in tracing such calls to their origin, which is often outside of Canada.”

The CRTC says that “It is working with the private sector on a system to allow consumers to report spoofed calls by simply keying in a number on their phones.”

In a letter widely distributed to telecom service providers in early October, CRTC Telecom Vice-chair Peter Menzies said:

Notwithstanding the CRTC’s success to date in reducing unwanted calls, our ability to enforce the law has been hampered by caller ID spoofing which is used by certain telemarketers to hide their true identity. The telephony honeypot and other tools, such as *50, will enrich the much needed intelligence to address the problem of caller ID spoofing.

The *50 program will enable consumers to report abusive telephone calls, along with the associated call detail records, to carriers, reputational services and law enforcement, free-of-charge. These records will enable carriers and the CRTC to determine the origin of the call, thereby thwarting miscreants’ attempts to hide their true identity and provide the necessary information for investigations. The CRTC will be deploying *50 as a voluntary and pilot program for carriers in the coming months with the goal of formally launching the program in late 2015.

Keep in mind that there is already a “Call Trace” feature for customers to help law enforcement tracing of calls. In most cases, that involves dialing “*57” immediately after hanging up on a threatening or abusive call. That feature puts a flag into a call detail record, enabling your phone company to only release to law enforcement personnel the correct record out of potentially dozens of calls you received that day. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in June [R vs Spencer], the police get the call information once they go to your phone company with a warrant.

The CRTC consideration of a different code number – *50 – raises all sorts of issues. Will consumers be confused by having two different numbers for call trace? Does the CRTC expect carriers to release the call detail records without production of a warrant?

Will this actually be effective in stopping calls from off shore ‘miscreants’?

How much are Canadians spending to maintain the enforcement infrastructure? The CRTC spent just over $3M in its enforcement branch and there was an additional $2.5M spent administering the do not call list and the complaint databases. The CRTC issued $1M in notices of penalties but it did not report how much of the $1M was actually collected. Note that any funds collected are sent to the general revenues of the government.

I continue to receive calls from air duct cleaning services and companies that promise to fix my credit score, or my favourite, “the technical department of Windows.” The most effective way to deal with them is very un-Canadian and very low-tech.

Just hang up.

Is there really a difference between charging $2 for a paper bill and providing a $2 discount to those who opt for electronic billing?

In the minds of parliamentarians there is.

Either way, consumers who opt for e-billing pay $2 less than those who still get a paper bill.

But proposed legislation only bans the explicit paper charge, not the e-billing discount. The Broadcast Act is proposed to be amended with:

34.1 No person who carries on a broadcasting undertaking shall charge a subscriber for providing the subscriber with a paper bill.

The Telecom Act is proposed to have a similar amendment, covering telecom services providers, wireless and wireline and including internet service providers. large and small:

27.2 Any person who provides telecommunications services shall not charge a subscriber for providing the subscriber with a paper bill.

These are amendments to the Acts with questionable value for consumers. There are two ways around the proposed law. One is to raise the base price for everyone and then provide a discount for the e-billing customers. The other is for the company to simply not offer paper billing as an option. How many internet service providers or new entrant companies offer only e-billing options?

My member of parliament started a Twitter defense of the new legislation even before the omnibus bill was introduced:

He was concerned about seniors and low income Canadians who may not have digital skills or even on-line capabilities. My regular readers know that I share concerns about the failure in leadership to deal with digital literacy and connectivity for disadvantaged groups.

But the reality is that the industry already indicated that it would look after these groups.

The CRTC held a meeting on August 28 to try to get industry wide consensus on such charges for paper bills – in effect, trying to get a competitive industry to collude on whether they would all agree on charges to consumers. The CRTC Vice-Chairs reported:

those companies that charge paper bill fees have agreed to provide exemptions for customers who have no personal or home broadband connection, persons with disabilities who need a paper bill, seniors aged 65 and over and veterans of the Canadian Armed Forces.

So – there goes that rationale for the legislation.

In the meantime, we know that incentives for e-billing lead to dramatically higher adoption of such services. One would have thought that the government would have wanted to encourage the adoption of e-billing. Once again, we see a failure to maintain consistency with a national digital agenda. As I wrote before (in “Don’t do stupid stuff“):

Increasingly, it appears that Canada needs a digital conscience in Ottawa to teach the Obama doctrine: stop doing stupid stuff.

Threatening to introduce legislation to ban charges for paper bills is another in a growing list of actions that are at cross purposes with achieving policy objectives.

I have also written in the past: “it has sometimes been difficult to determine what the government would like to achieve.” It should be simple: Set clear objectives. Align activities with the achievement of those objectives. Stop doing things that are contrary to the objectives.

Years from now, will people look back at the proposed paper billing law and put it in the category of Canada’s Criminal Code ban on crime comics and other strange artifacts of a different era?

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Ottawa and St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, an article in the National Post reports the government considering new legislation that would make it an offence to condone terrorist acts online.

Sources suggest the government is likely to bring in new hate speech legislation that would make it illegal to claim terrorist acts are justified online.
…
… the new legislation was crafted before this week’s events and is not “trauma tainted.”

A number of years ago, I had been active in exploring issues associated with policing illegal content on the internet. We have explored the technical capability as well as many of the policy and purely logistical issues associated with identifying and dealing with hate and illegal content on the internet.

Recall, it was just over a year ago that this government repealed section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, but at the time, we were told the government was committed to “buffing up the Criminal Code to ensure that [disadvantaged] groups would not be left open to hate speech.”

Over the past 8 or 9 years, much information has been gathered about hate and illegal content on the internet. As such, I thought it might helpful to review what has been written on this blog as the issue may become prominent over the coming months.

A partial bibliography of related blog posts can be found here:

• Responding to online hate • April 4, 2012
• Hate on the internet • November 10, 2010
• Ottawa dealing with hate • November 5, 2010
• Bounds on speech freedoms • December 21, 2009
• Indicting a hate-monger • December 12, 2008
• ISPs told to deal with online hate • November 25, 2008
• Shuttering hate • October 21, 2008
• Hate laws in an internet world • September 17, 2008
• France orders ISPs to block hate content • July 4, 2008
• Shutting down hate on the internet • October 29, 2007
• Continuing the war on hate • July 14, 2007
• The 11 hallmarks of hate messages • December 5, 2006
• Score one against hate • September 1, 2006
• Blocking content • August 23, 2006
• Cyber Hate Ruling • March 10, 2006
• Being held accountable • February 4, 2014

The Canadian Telecom Summit explored the issue of illegal content on the internet in previous years. Should the issue be on the agenda in 2015?

Are there bounds on freedom of speech in an internet world? Should there be?

Are Canadian small businesses really lagging on the web?

CIRA, the dot-CA folks, marked “BDC Small Business Week” by publishing a blog post yesterday complaining “Canadian Small Businesses are Lagging in Online Presence“.

Once again, we were told that “Three-quarters of Canadians research purchases online, but only 41 per cent of small businesses have an online presence”.

The inference is that if 75% of Canadians are researching their purchases online, then presumably 75% of small businesses should be there to respond to the consumer queries.

But lets look at the source data. The CIRA Fact Book says

Only 45.5 per cent of Canadian businesses have a website. For Canadian small businesses – a significant portion of Canada’s private sector – this number drops to 41.1 per cent. While low, this percentage is on par with American businesses. In 2013, Google reported that 58 per cent of U.S. businesses do not have a website.

What’s that? Do you see what they did there? Mixing Canadian figures with the inverse of the US numbers?

We have 45.5% of Canadian businesses with a website, compared with only 42% of US businesses. Canadian businesses aren’t lagging and they are doing better than just being “on par with American businesses”; Canadian businesses are ahead of their US counterparts.

The source data for the CIRA Fact Book is Statistics Canada (Table 358-0193).

It starts to get really interesting when you look beyond the summary data and ask StatsCan to breakout the data by industry classification. Then we can see which sectors are really bringing down the averages. For example, only 27% of “Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting” businesses have a website, but that is a 50% improvement over 2012. Food and beverage stores are stuck around 22% and only 1 in 5 gas stations have a website.

The StatsCan data tells us that 100% of large enterprises reporting as Industry Code “Gasoline stations” have a website, but only 18% of the small businesses in that category have a site. That makes sense. I am more likely to look for a service station under the brand name, not the numbered company that happens to own the particular franchise location.

“Transportation and warehousing” is another category that has a significant difference between the small business figures (17%, interesting that this is down from 19.3% in 2012) and the large enterprise web presence (nearly 95%).

It is important to look at this data in combination with the number of businesses in each category in order to understand where the biggest challenges and opportunities can be found.

We need to do more to improve digital literacy among businesses and consumers. And, we need to improve conditions for businesses to adopt digital technology. But we also need more data and better analysis before proclaiming that Canadian small business is lagging.

Happy anniversary.

It has been 5 years since the CRTC introduced its ground-breaking regulatory policy on Internet Traffic Management Practices. At the time, Konrad von Finckenstein, the CRTC Chair, hailed the policy, saying “Canada is the first country to develop and implement a comprehensive approach to Internet traffic management practices.”

It can be lonely being first.

Last year, I wrote about an OpEd in Forbes that warned net neutrality rules could block innovation that can offers more services at a lower cost. In the Forbes article, Everett Ehrlich, Bill Clinton’s former undersecretary of commerce wrote that net neutrality could be keeping consumer bills higher than they might be otherwise:

Moreover, getting rid of “neutrality” would lower consumers’ bills. That’s because the Internet is something economists call a “two-sided market.” A newspaper such as USATODAY is such a two-sided market – it charges advertisers to reach its readers, and it charges its readers to see its advertisements.

If a newspaper wasn’t allowed to take money from its advertisers, the reader would have to pay more. It’s the same with the Internet; if a provider can’t charge the big websites for a premium connection (if they want one) then the consumer has to pay instead, meaning consumers subsidize the companies sending big data packets.

Ehrlich called for Tom Wheeler, the incoming FCC Chair, to “end this tired debate” in the United States: “The rules that governed e-mail two decades ago won’t bring us the new services that lie ahead, and an Internet stuck in ‘neutral’ isn’t going anywhere.”

South of the border, the debate has hardly ended.

Gordon Crovitz, the former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, writes in this week’s edition of his Information Age column that by lobbying for ‘net neutrality’ regulations, big technology companies pave the way for authoritarian governments to censor the Internet.

In 2012, for example, the browser company Mozilla warned that the Internet “is just too fundamental to our lives to leave it to governments to decide its fate.” Now, Mozilla — along with other fair-weather friends of the open Internet such as Facebook, Netflix and advocacy groups such as Public Knowledge — is busily lobbying Washington under the “net neutrality” banner to regulate Internet companies under telecommunications laws designed in the 1930s for the AT&T monopoly. They want the Internet to become a utility, with regulators setting prices and rules. Silicon Valley’s embrace of regulation at home undermines its case against the ITU.

Citing Eli Dourado, a George Mason researcher on Internet governance, Crovitz argues that the reality of international politics means the US has a hard time “arguing that regulating for neutrality and common carriage is OK, but regulating for security, content and payment is not.”

The International Telecommunications Union has just begun meetings in Busan, South Korea that could result in a vote over the future of the internet.

There was a risk for Canada in being first.

Five years later, how many countries have followed Canada’s lead? Should we be reviewing the policy framework for traffic management and content delivery examining whether our rules are appropriate? Does our leadership in regulation enable Canada to take a leadership role in the deliberations in Busan?

Canada may have been first, but one might ask if Canada can be considered a leader if other countries haven’t followed behind. Are Canadians – consumers, creators and carriers – well served by the current “comprehensive approach to Internet traffic management practices”?

Does net neutrality help advance our digital economy, or keep us stuck in neutral?

Is the net neutrality framework another area that should be reviewed by a communications policy review panel?

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Update: [October 21, 3:00 pm]
There is a good piece in the MIT Technology Review today by former FCC Chief Economist Gerald R. Faulhaber and former FCC Chief Technologist David Farber.

David Clark of MIT, an early chief protocol architect of the Internet, has said that “the network is not neutral and never has been,” dismissing the assumptions of net neutrality supporters as “happy little bunny rabbit dreams.” Early Internet operators routinely discriminated in favor of traffic that was sensitive to latency, and similar options are available today. The phenomenal success of the Internet suggests that the technologists who have been running it really don’t need help.

They conclude “Yes, the open Internet is in danger. But not from lack of neutrality—from the prospect of the FCC regulating it like a 20th-century utility.”