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?

In an appearance on CNBC on Monday, former AOL-Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin acknowledged the failure of AOL-Time Warner, calling it the “worst deal of the century.”

He said CEOs should take responsibility for failed companies.

It’s time for those who are involved in companies to stand up and say, ‘you know what, I’m solely responsible for it. I was the CEO; I was in charge; I’m really very sorry about the pain and suffering and loss this has caused. I take responsibility. It wasn’t the board; it wasn’t my colleagues. It wasn’t the bankers and lawyers.

Think back to all those multi-billion dollar paper acquisitions of a decade ago and the collapse of industry stalwarts.

Any other former CEOs willing to stand up?

In an interesting filing to the FCC [ pdf, 100KB], AT&T; said that the public switched telephone network (“PSTN”) and plain-old telephone service (“POTS”) are relics of a by-gone era.

Revenues from POTS are plummeting as customers cut their landlines in favor of the convenience and advanced features of wireless and VoIP services. At the same time, due to the high fixed costs of providing POTS, every customer who abandons this service raises the average cost-per-line to serve the remaining customers. With an outdated product, falling revenues, and rising costs, the POTS business is unsustainable for the long run. Yet a web of federal and state regulations has the cumulative effect of prolonging, unnecessarily, the life of POTS and the PSTN.

The CRTC has been told to examine whether its regulation distorts the business case for facilities upgrades in the context of wholesale services.

The CRTC proceeding does not have a sufficiently broad scope to examine the issues raised by AT&T; in its FCC filing. At what point will Canada formally launch the development of a national digital strategy?

This issue and many more will be discussed at The 2010 Canadian Telecom Summit in June. Among other sessions, ADM Helen McDonald of Industry Canada will be moderating a panel examining “Building Digital Canada.”

Early Bird rates are in effect until the end of February. Have you registered yet?

Welcome back and Happy New Year!

The new year may also bring a new session of Parliament.

Through the holidays, we learned of plans to prorogue parliament, which will lead to the death of 4 technology related bills, as Michael Geist reported, including Bill C-27, the so-called Electronic Commerce Protection Act (ECPA).

As I wrote last May, the bill is flawed in that it goes far beyond protection from spam to prevent forms of commercial contact in digital form that are perfectly legal in paper form. McCarthy’s had also warned about restrictions being too broad.

Typically, we see internet communications as being more open than traditional media – we are less likely to impose restrictions on digital content than print or other forms. As it is written, the bill would be better titled the Electronic Commerce Restrictions Act; it discourages many efficiencies that should be available to businesses of all sizes in reaching out to new customers.

Hopefully, the reintroduction of the bill will enable Industry Canada to encourage confidence in e-commerce without choking off incentives for Canadian business to adopt innovative business models.