What is on the agenda for the year ahead?

As we gear back up after the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, it is somewhat customary to look ahead to the coming year.

Here is what tops my list:

• Driving universal adoption
• Online harms
• Regulatory overreach
• Mandated wholesale access
• Impacts of investment on coverage and resilience
• Digital literacy

I published my 2023 reflections in mid-December and indicated that the issue of driving increased adoption would need to be a carry-over to the year ahead. In my agenda for 2023, I wrote “there is a big difference between having universal access to broadband, and attaining universal adoption of that service.”

A number of reports indicate that affordability is not the primary barrier inhibiting broadband adoption. We saw that most recently in Ofcom’s Online Nation report. The UK report matches Canadian data showing just a quarter of those without a home connection cite the cost of service as the main reason. Across the country (including the far north), service providers have targeted programs to address affordability for disadvantaged households.

Still, we continue to have issues with people appreciating the utility of a broadband connection. I sometimes wonder if the social research is sufficiently adept at assessing whether “I don’t have a need for broadband” is a euphemism for “I have other priorities for my limited income”. If a parent is having to make difficult choices about buying name-brand versus no-name macaroni and cheese to feed the family dinner, then maybe a connected computer just isn’t a priority. As various levels of government continue to fund improved broadband access, I believe that more needs to be done to understand the factors that are inhibiting adoption, and then develop actions to relax each of those inhibitions.

Many of my 2024 agenda items have overlap with others. For example, to what extent have concerns about online safety and cyber security hindered adoption of broadband among those who are not yet connected?

Online harms will be on the agenda for the coming year. Misinformation, disinformation, and hate are significant online challenges. However, in a democratic society, what is the appropriate approach to address harmful forms of expression? As I wrote last year, the government is exploring new legislation but I am not convinced that this is the appropriate approach.

Will regulatory overreach be overruled by the courts or by changes in government policy? The CRTC is planning substantial organizational growth (30%) to deal with the Online News Act and the Online Streaming Act. Before the holidays, there was an interesting article from the US Chamber of Commerce, “How the FCC’s Regulatory Overreach Impedes Internet for All”.

We have seen how some of the CRTC’s determinations on mandated wholesale access can lead to reduced competition by stifling investment. How does that impact coverage for broadband, advanced wireless services, and investment in increased network resilience?

Improved digital literacy and education seems to be a common theme across many of the items on this year’s agenda. Can improved digital education help reduce vulnerability to certain forms of cyber attacks?

It is shaping up to be a busy year. Hopefully, I’ll be more successful checking these items off my list than some of my personal New Year’s resolutions.

What else do you have on your telecom policy plan for 2024?

Which of my blog posts were the Top 5 in 2023, the ones that attracted the most attention?

Looking at the analytics, these 5 articles had the most individual page views:

1. “Incubating innovation” [November 22, 2022]
2. “3800 MHz auction preview” [May 25, 2023]
3. “The economics of broadband revisited” [March 28, 2023]
4. “Dealing with online harms” [January 24, 2023]
5. “#CHPC reviews government funding of antisemitism” [February 16, 2023]

Honourable mentions go to:

• “Canada’s future depends on connectivity” [August 15, 2020]
• “Stinky fish” [May 11, 2023]

Fascinating to see that one of my posts from 2020 continues to attract so much interest from so many readers.

Which posts resonated the most with you? I posted my year-end wrap-up just last week, so it hasn’t had a chance to crack the Top 5… yet!

Thank you for following me here on this blog and on Twitter, and thank you for engaging online and by phone over the past year.

Click here to subscribe to my weekly newsletter, with its digest of the previous week’s blog posts.

I hope the coming holiday period provides an opportunity to connect with your family and friends. Let me reiterate my very best wishes for health, happiness and peace in the year ahead.

With a certain degree of poetic license, I am continuing to use lyrics from Joni Mitchell’s Circle Game as the title of my year-end wrap-up. Add 50 to the title to get a more realistic picture of where I am at.

Sixteen springs and sixteen summers gone now
Cartwheels turn to car wheels thru the town
And they tell him take your time it won’t be long now
Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down

No. I am not ready to slow those circles down. There still seems to be so much to get done.

This past year has been somewhat challenging, so in many ways I will be happy to turn the page in the calendar. Aside: Will my grandkids understand that metaphor? Our family is particularly grateful for the miracles enabled and delivered to us over the past year thanks to pharmaceutical and medical research. At the same time, we are deeply pained by horrors of the terrorist attack of October 7, and the global rise of overt antisemitism.

I have family in the Middle East. It is disturbing to see the number of people who seem uninformed, or misinformed about what triggered the war. And, that provides an appropriate segue to one of the main themes of this year-end post.

Improved access to quality information is the presumptive raison d’être for Canada’s Online News Act, Bill C-18. While I understand the motivation behind the legislation, as I have written, its implementation was badly fumbled.

Unfortunately, I am concerned that this is another case of government focus on the supply side without consideration of factors impacting demand. With all the best funding in the world to create better news, are we doing enough work to ensure there is a market to consume that news? Just as I have frequently complained about our work on broadband, we seem to be better at stimulating supply, and rely upon a Field of Dreams hope for the demand side. What if you build it and they don’t come? There are a number of ways to improve funding for news, but how does that help deliver quality information to a generation who don’t watch linear TV, and don’t pick up a newspaper, or rely upon news websites?

What do we do if we provide funding to create high quality local and national newsrooms, but a generation of consumers rely on 30-second high-energy video clips where adherence to facts isn’t valued as highly as the entertainment quality by the search algorithms?

Will digital literacy training in elementary and secondary schools include teaching how to differentiate between information, misinformation, and disinformation? How can we create more sophisticated consumers of high quality content?

Dealing with supply side issues is relatively easy. In most cases, if you throw enough money at the problem, it gets solved, whether it is building broadband, funding newsrooms, creating quality Canadian media content. Dealing with the demand side is much more challenging. What do we do when Canada’s universal broadband objectives are met, but more than a million people remain off-line? The issue of driving increased adoption will need to be a carry-over from my 2023 agenda into next year.

Being well informed is an important prerequisite for responsible leaders. Helping you stay informed is one of the reasons I added 98 blog posts to “Telecom Trends” over the course of 2023, continuing to write around 2 posts per week. There are more than 3260 posts in the archives (fully searchable). In 2023, I migrated my weekly newsletter to a new platform. You can subscribe here.

As I have said in the past, it is my objective for this blog to be a source of quality information on Canadian telecom policy, with occasional gastronomical diversions. In each case, I am trying to share elements of my expertise accumulated over decades.

I look forward to engaging with you in the New Year, readying for yet another spring and summer.

I wish you and your families a happy, healthy, safe and peaceful holiday season.

Last week, the UK communications regulator, Ofcom, released the 2023 edition of its annual Online Nation report [pdf, 4.3MB].

The report is described as “an overview of the UK online landscape in 2023, exploring children’s and adults’ use of and experiences on online services.”

Online Nation represents a snapshot of UK online use from May 2023 and compares trends to data collected in May 2022 (previous years reports are also available from Ofcom).

47.9 million UK adults accessed the internet on smartphones, tablets and computers in May 2023, spending an average of 3 hours 41 minutes a day online, eight minutes more than in May 2022. Young adults continue to spend the most time online, with 18-24-year-olds spending a daily average of 4 hours 36 minutes, and the 65+ group spending the least time (2 hours 46 minutes).

I am always interested in broadband adoption data. The latest Ofcom report shows that 93% of UK individuals over the age of 16 have home internet. Of those without home internet, “a perceived lack of need or interest” was the top reason expressed by nearly two thirds (65%). Cost related reasons were given by a quarter of the respondents. This aligns with similar findings from Pew for the United States. That price isn’t the biggest inhibitor for broadband adoption in Canada was the subject of a blog post of mine in 2021.

Adoption rates vary by age, with 18% of those aged 65 or older without home internet, but only 2% of those aged 25-34. Only 2% of households with children reported not having home internet. Of the 7% of UK residents over the age of 16 without home internet, 71% said they were unlikely to get internet in the next 12 months.

According to Statistics Canada, 94% of Canadian households had home internet in 2022. (The Statistics Canada Telecommunications portal has other useful links)

The report is 106 pages with a wealth of information. In addition, Ofcom has an interactive version of the data.

Early in 2023, I wrote, “Hopefully, 2023 will begin to bring better research into understanding those factors inhibiting broadband adoption among different groups in order to develop appropriate responses.”

It remains fertile ground for academic research in the year ahead.

Would more sophisticated content consumers help Canada avoid the need to implement online harms restrictions?

In early 2022, I described Finland’s approach, teaching school kids how to process information online, including checking and verifying “news” and “facts” being shared on social media. As the Daily Telegraph wrote at the time, “Teaching and learning about media literacy and critical thinking is a life-long journey. It starts at kindergartens and continues at elementary schools, high schools and universities”.

While the Canadian government has been under pressure to introduce its long-promised Online Harms bill, I continue to wonder if more effort should be focused on teaching critical thinking skills in Canada.

I am doubtful that the government should be in the business of determining what content should be blocked. This current government is not qualified to block information that it judges to be “misinformation”; as I pointed out in late October, the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and Minister of Innovation all circulated incorrect information that inflamed antisemitism. How can this government judge others’ content, when their own information has been harmful.

I am not a fan of technology specific legislation. At the same time, it is reasonable to expect that content that is considered illegal in print media should continue to be considered illegal in digital form.

It is extremely challenging to try to block content that is determined to be harmful. Blocking the content in one location will simply create an incentive for the content to emerge somewhere else. It becomes a never ending game of whack-a-mole.

In a recent article on The Hub, Richard Stursberg calls for “the news industry to decouple from social media”, saying “Much of social media is a sewer, polluted with content that claims to be true but is, in fact, disinformation and fake news.” The article claims that credible news gets judged by the company it is keeping on social media, compromising Canadians’ confidence, resulting in less trust for traditional news.

Under the circumstances, the best course might be for the news industry to simply leave social media. It could then set up its own platform, access to which would only be granted to firms that subscribed to a tough code of journalistic ethics like those in place for the CBC, the Globe and Mail, and CTV.

I am not as confident as the author that “It would be a simple matter to set up such a platform.”

Instead, what if we try to develop a society filled with more sophisticated content consumers? Can we create a series of school curricula, from kindergarten through university, to improve digital and media literacy and develop critical thinking?

Such a project would be a long term investment.

The Oxford Internet Institute recently released a study of nearly 12,000 children in the United States, that found no evidence that screen time impacted their brain function or well-being. The abstract for the full study said there were two hypotheses being tested: that functional brain organization is related to digital screen engagement; and, that children with higher rates of engagement will have functional brain organization profiles related to maladaptive functioning. “Results did not support either of these predictions for [screen media activity].”

While some schools boards have been considering whether to remove screens from classrooms, I wonder if a better approach is to focus on programs that teach improved digital literacy skills, learning how to differentiate between good information and bad, and helping kids become more informed consumers of digital content.

Can such programs help innoculate Canadians against a wide variety of online harms, including online hate, fraud, misinformation and disinformation?

Creating more sophisticated content consumers will require a longer time horizon with more patience required to implement, but will it deliver a better outcome than trying to legislate government controls on freedoms of expression?