Twitter forces a discipline in writing. With only 140 characters, I have learned to review my tweets, removing extraneous words like “that” or future perfect sentence structures. There are some who write tweets that read like old classified ads; I lack the patience to decipher these. Others who write extended tweets marking them 1/4, 2/4… as though we follow them – and only them.

So I have an appreciation for Tweets that are especially concise in expressing a thought, such as Karen Selick’s exchange last night with Jesse Kline:

@accessd Govt can’t leave anything alone. If they’re not subsidizing something, they’re prohibiting it.

— Karen Selick (@kselick) July 8, 2012

I have precisely this concern with the national digital strategy.

Over the past few years, I have written about the potential for unintended consequences when government tries to pick winners, such as: “Weaning Canadians from government intervention“; and, “Toronto ICT plans“. I am continually troubled by the inequities of government handouts to certain businesses, which inevitably mean that one industry participant is receiving a subsidy from their competitors. I hate seeing Ministers flying coast to coast handing out cheques, while spending as much (if not more) on the photo op itself.

What are the areas that truly need the leadership role or guiding hand of government? Will government be able to resist the temptation to intervene in areas that should be left alone? Can we see leadership without increased spending?

It is summer camp season – a seasonal peak for post offices in cottage country as kids are forced to write letters and parents try to sneak snack foods in their packages to kids who got shipped off for the summer.

When my kids were of camping age, pen and paper were the only means of communicating with their camp. The nearest internet connection was a 30 minute drive away from the camp. We would sneak fax messages in through the camp nurse – an extended family member.

Today, my informal survey of friends indicates that different camps have different policies on the use of high tech for communicating home. A colleague tells me that his kid actually needs to write letters. He says that wifi and mobile devices are banned at the camp: “kids would never leave their cabins.”

I have been trying to picture the conversation that counselors have with their campers. Here is a pencil and paper. You are going to write letters to your parents and your sister and your grandparents. We will put a stamp on it and charge your tuck account $1 and it might take 7 to 10 days for the letter to get delivered. No, your parents won’t reply right away and there is no confirmation that the message was ever received.

LOL

Forget roughing it by going for a 7 day canoe trip with no flush toilets or hot showers; are kids actually managing to go without their technology for the summer?

Think about it for a few minutes. Could you go for a month with no internet or phone connectivity, relying on postal service alone?

Microsoft has released a research paper: “You’re Capped!” Understanding the Effects of Bandwidth Caps on Broadband Use in the Home [pdf, 362 KB] that is an important read. Its abstract says:

Bandwidth caps, a limit on the amount of data users can upload and download in a month, are common globally for both home and mobile Internet access. With caps, each bit of data consumed comes at a cost against a monthly quota or a running tab. Yet, relatively little work has considered the implications of this usage-based pricing model on the user experience. In this paper, we present results from a qualitative study of households living with bandwidth caps. Our findings suggest home users grapple with three uncertainties regarding their bandwidth usage: invisible balances, mysterious processes, and multiple users. We discuss how these uncertainties impact their usage and describe the potential for better tools to help monitor and manage data caps. We conclude that as a community we need to cater for users under Internet cost constraints.

The paper opens with a recognition that ISPs are looking at usage sensitive pricing models because they are faced with “increased network congestion from both the rise in bandwidth intensive applications and the growing number of Internet users”. The study observes that caps exist in countries such as “Australia, Canada, Turkey, South Africa, the U.K., and the U.S.” and are not restricted to home broadband but are also applied to mobile internet. The paper suggests that the pricing model is likely to persist.

we argue that it is time to re-examine the assumption that for end-users the only cost associated with network use is speed.

The study concludes that the IT community might want to rethink assumptions about unlimited bandwidth in the design of applications and devices. The paper is a refreshing contribution to the discussion on usage sensitive pricing models.

 

Although TELUS says it is “fully compliant with foreign ownership restrictions”, the Globalive / Wind Mobile application to review that compliance raises some very interesting issues.

First of all, now that the application has been filed with the Commission, it is not possible for TELUS to have any ex-parte discussions with Commissioners to discuss the ownership or proposed restructuring. The CRTC was quite strict about avoiding meetings with Globalive during its 2009 ownership review; there is no reason to believe that the Commission would be more lenient with the TELUS review.

As such, TELUS will need to prove its compliance in what could be a lengthy public proceeding, especially if Globalive succeeds in having the CRTC conduct a Type 3 or 4 review.

According to the news report, Globalive is claiming that 48% of TELUS’ voting shares are held with non-Canadian addresses. If that is accurate, that number is about 50% too high; only one third of voting shares can be held by non-Canadians according to the bright line test set out in the definition of a “qualified corporation” in the Ownership Regulations.

It becomes interesting to contemplate how such a situation could be remedied, if the CRTC determines that there is, in fact, a problem. How would you fix this?

Your comments, as always, are welcome.

Wind Mobile has asked the CRTC to review TELUS ownership to ensure compliance with foreign ownership limits, according to a story on Bloomberg.

Simon Lockie, the chief regulatory officer of Globalive is quoted in the story saying:

WIND is bringing this application because TELUS’s complicated and rarely-used measures for controlling the level of foreign ownership of its publicly-traded voting shares, along with its recent proposal to restructure its share capital by converting its non-voting shares into voting shares, raises complex and novel issues that have not been dealt with by the CRTC to date.

The last phrase is key to triggering a full public proceeding for the review of TELUS’ ownership In Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2009-428, Canadian ownership and control review policy, the CRTC wrote:

the Commission will hold an oral, public, multi-party proceeding (Type 4 review) where an ownership or governance structure is of a complex or novel nature, such that in the Commission’s view its determination will hold precedential value to industry players and the general public

Recall that in 2009, TELUS challenged Wind Mobile’s eligibility to operate, triggering a lengthy set of CRTC proceedings including an oral hearing, and leading to the CRTC ruling against Wind Mobile, Wind successfully turning to cabinet and a subsequent supreme court appeal (that the Court refused to hear).

The federal government’s liberalization of the foreign ownership rules, about to go into effect, do not apply to Bell, TELUS or Rogers.

So much for a quiet summer.