Nearly two years ago, I wrote that governments need to find a way to increase the penetration of households with computers.

Maybe Canada needs to look at targeting broadband subsidies based on income, regardless of where people live. There is a gap in the level of connectedness among lower income Canadians in urban markets as well. Maybe it is time to consider making PCs and broadband part of our social welfare system.

A tweet from Catherine Middleton pointed me to an article talking about a plan in the UK to provide laptop computers and broadband internet to 270,000 low-income households in the UK. Yesterday, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said:

We want every family to become a broadband family, and we want every home linked to a school. For those finding it difficult to afford this, today I can announce the nationwide rollout of our home access programme to get laptops and broadband at home for 270,000 families.

Dr. Middleton will be part of the program at The 2010 Canadian Telecom Summit, participating on a panel looking at International Perspectives on ICT Strategies.

What can Canada learn from other countries as we begin to examine the development of a national digital strategy?

There were two pieces that were released last week that caught my eye while I was travelling south of the border.

One was the support that the Liberal Party gave to the SaveOurNet crowd. Appearing on the Liberal Party blog, the support appears to rely on the flawed OECD statistics that we have talked about many times [such as here]. Our study, not mentioned at all by the Liberals, showed numerous studies that contradict the oft cited OECD report.

Here is what the Liberals said:

We agree with the position put forward by the Obama administration in the US. ISPs should not be able to discriminate and block or interfere in legitimate sites, users or applications. The Liberal Party, supports the principle of net neutrality and an open and competitive internet environment. We have called on the Conservatives to set clear principles and regulations with regards to net neutrality consistent with what is being proposed in the U.S.:

• ISPs cannot prevent access of users to lawful content, applications and devices
• ISPs must treat all lawful content, applications and services in a non-discriminatory manner; and
• ISPs must disclose all information with regards to network management.

These net neutrality principles must apply to all Internet networks, including wireless networks. [formatting corrected]

The Liberals may not be closely following what is actually happening in the US.

As Larry Downes of the Stanford Law School Center for Internet & Society reported on CNet last week (and as we observed on Twitter in December), it appears that the Obama administration is moving away from a more ‘militant’ vision of government intervention set out by the FCC Chair last September.

The FCC is in the midst of gathering information from all sides of the issue before coming out with a final set of rules and policies. Hopefully, the Liberals will consult with other viewpoints in order to develop a more reasoned view. As we noted in December, the Obama administration’s FCC observed that “Policy changes require consideration of unintended consequences.”

AT&T; was one of the main sponsors of Thursday night’s US college football championships held at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. If you were watching the game, I was the guy wearing a Texas Longhorns baseball cap and T-shirt.

Throughout the game, commercials for its 3G network coverage appeared on the scoreboard video screen. Unfortunately, there was no coverage in the Rose Bowl stadium area. The best any of us could receive was EDGE.

Registrations are already running ahead of last year’s pace for The 2010 Canadian Telecom Summit. For the past 3 months, Michael Sone and I have been working on development of the program for The 2010 Canadian Telecom Summit, which will take place this year June 7-9, once again at The Toronto Congress Centre.

You can now visit the conference website to take a look at the preliminary program on-line.

You will see that we are working on some interesting new sessions dealing with many of the issues that have been raised on the pages of this blog or in my tweets. Over the next few months, I’ll take a closer look at some of the themes for discussion at the event.

Be sure to hold the dates and we hope you will join us in June.

If you want to propose a speaker, just contact us. If you aren’t yet on our email list, please sign-up at this location.

A couple of recent articles highlight the question of who gets to control the business model for content developers and owners.

Via a tweet by Barry Sookman, I noticed that an argument raised by music sharer Joel Tenenbaum was that it was “fair use” for him to get songs for free because at the time, the record labels didn’t release the music in his preferred format until 2007. As Ben Sheffner writes:

I know of no legal support for such an argument; copyright owners have no obligation to offer their works at all (let alone in a particular format), on pain of losing their exclusive rights.

Then, I was pointed by a tweet from Michael Hennessy to an article about TV Everywhere, a US cable service similar to Rogers On Demand Online (RODO). The article responded to criticism of TV Everywhere by elements who seem to want everything digital for free.

TV Everywhere, like RODO, relies on a model that provides access to content on internet connected devices to consumers that already have a subscription to those TV services delivered over more conventional vehicles.

As it happens, many programmers rely on the subscriber-based license fees they receive from cable operators and other distributors to remain economically viable. In order to sustain that model and continue investing and creating, many content owners may want to ensure that they are compensated for the viewing or use of their programs online. There is nothing nefarious or mysterious about this: Programmers invest tens of billions of dollars a year to produce high quality content; they have the right to experiment with different business models and determine how to recoup that investment in terms of distributing their content on different platforms.

Yesterday’s posting spoke of CEOs that lost sight of the need to generate sufficient revenues to cover costs – what a novel approach to stay in business – make money!

Who will get to determine the business models for digital content?

National digital strategies will be the theme for sessions on June 8 at The 2010 Canadian Telecom Summit. Have you registered yet?