Michael Geist points to a private member’s bill introduced by Liberal MP Karen Redman last Thursday. Named the The Internet Child Pornography Prevention Act, the bill seeks to license all ISPs and have those ISPs adhere to some new guideines. In my view, it is well intentioned, but flawed.

The purpose of the bill is clear enough:

The purpose of this Act is to prevent the use of the Internet to unlawfully promote, display, describe or facilitate participation in unlawful sexual activity involving young persons.

The measures seek to place more responsibility onto internet service providers.

The bill introduces a CRTC licensing regime.

No person shall offer the services of, or operate as, an Internet service provider unless the person has been granted a licence to operate as an Internet service provider

This is not particularly onerous. We have all sorts of telecom service provider licensing and registrations today already. Those ISPs who are already providing voice services need to register already. The bill does not define what is an ISP. Does it refer to internet access providers, hosting companies, both?

This bill would allow the Commission to block previous offenders from operating an ISP, or being a director or officer of an ISP. Further, the bill would permit the Minister to order ISPs to block certain content found to be child pornography. The current legislation only allows the CRTC to authorize the blocking of content – a subtle but important distinction.

Among the biggest challenges are the requirements in section 5(1):

No Internet service provider shall knowingly permit the use of its service

1. for placing child pornography on the Internet or for viewing, reading, copying or retrieving child pornography from the Internet;
2. by any person who the provider knows has been convicted of an offence under this Act within the previous seven years; or
3. by any person who the provider knows has used the Internet within the previous seven years for a purpose that would be an offence under this Act.

Other portions of the bill appear to be redundant with existing legislation, although the new bill uses conflicting language.

South of the border, last week Congressman Ed Markey (D-Mass) introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act. Markey chairs the House Subcommittee on Telecommunication and the Internet, so his bill is more likely to generate active debate, especially since his bill is co-sponsored by Republican Chip Pickering.

There will be a session on Net Neutrality on Wednesday June 18 at The Canadian Telecom Summit.

Early bird rates end in less than two weeks on March 1. Book your place now!

According to a Globe and Mail article, TELUS CEO Darren Entwistle is not happy with the way his wireless division is operating.

Churn is higher than he would like, blamed in part on the flexibility users have with wireless number portability (WNP). Number portability makes it easier for people to leave, but the corollary, of course, is that WNP provides an opportunity for carriers to attract customers from their competition.

Clearly this aspect of Telus’s performance is one that I am less than satisfied with.

How far will carriers go to keep customers from churning?

Canada is sitting at 61% wireless penetration. That translates into an opportunity of 6M additional users to just bring us to the 80% level currently enjoyed south of the border. TELUS’ fair share would be about 2M of those users and Darren likes to see his team “punch beyond its weight class.”

More specifically, how will TELUS improve its wireless performance? Watch for more news to emerge from potential suppliers for its next generation mobile network. A project this big will be tough to keep under wraps.

Although the company’s official position is that network enhancements are a continual evolutionary process, we might expect to see a more dramatic repositioning. As The Toronto Star suggests, perhaps the network investment will likely be timed to try to grab a significant share of the Olympic roaming traffic in 2 years.

From an organizational perspective, will we see a return to a stand-alone TELUS Mobility reporting to an executive responsible for the entire business unit?

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mobile, TELUS

Canadian companies have come under increasing pressure to lower their cost structure.

On top of having to keep up with productivity improvements among our trading partners, Canadian firms have to deal with the dramatic strengthening of the dollar – which lowers the cost of imports and challenges the pricing of our exports.

Some Canadian telecom carriers have moved some jobs off-shore and are now wholesaling their experience in successfully delivering services using a global workforce. How do firms preserve their unique character in a strategic sourcing arrangement? What parts of the firm can be sourced off-shore? How does global sourcing impact reliability and other quality metrics?

We’re going to be looking at strategic sourcing in a session on Monday June 16 at The Canadian Telecom Summit. In addition, CP Gurnani, the international operations president of Tech Mahindra, a leading global outsourcing firm that focuses on the telecom space, will be participating in a session with the CIO of BT Wholesale to end the day on June 17. Their session will look at how British Telecom has restructured to compete domestically and globally.

Early bird rates end in two weeks on March 1. Book your place now!

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strategic sourcing, BT, Tech Mahindra, Canadian Telecom Summit

Travel kept me from providing some thoughts on the theft of customer data that Bell revealed on Tuesday.

The Globe and Mail reports that the privacy commissioner is now going to look into various aspects of the data loss. Bell has not been completely forthright with exactly what information fell into the wrong hands or in what form (digital or paper) that theft took place.

While Bell says that it is notifying the affected customers who had non-published numbers, the company hasn’t said whether or not it plans to notify the remaining 95% of the 3.4M affected subscribers about what information was stolen. Bell says

No information relating to personal identification numbers, customer credit, credit card numbers, reference checks, billing or long-distance calling details were included in the stolen material.

However, Bell says that it was more information than is found in the phone book:

The customer information recovered in the investigation includes name, address, telephone number and list of Bell services.

There is no mention of exactly what details were in the “list of Bell services.” For example, did the thief get a list of cell phone numbers? Did they find out who subscribes to a Bell security service? A Bell long distance plan with special rates to certain countries? Details about the TV channels that are in subscribers’ Expressvu package? Information about who gets the adult channels? Did they learn about combinations of services that might be indicators that there are children in the home? Or disabled? Or snowbirds who leave their home vacant for months.

Besides the invasion of privacy, all of this information can be used to assist in social engineering fraud or help criminals in targeting vulnerable households.

Bell’s customers deserve to hear the specifics of whether they were part of the affected group and to learn exactly what information was released.

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Bell, social engineering

RIM’s outage this week, on the opening day of the Mobile World Congress, couldn’t have been timed any worse. Mind you, Alec Saunders reports that connectivity in Barcelona “has been an absolute bear.” A day later, RIM says that it is still investigating but the outage was caused by an upgrade to a routing system that had been recently upgraded.

I have been going back through my files and there seems to be a pattern of Blackberry network failures every 10 months or so. February 11, 2008, April 17, 2007, July 12, 2006, March 13, 2006.

We need to look at some trend analysis here. The July 12, 2006 outage was more localized and was blamed on a fibre cut. The other failures were more major network outages. What is going on?

Al Gore might blame the trouble on climate change, given the winter / spring time of year (February, March and April).

Is there anything to be found in the dates themselves? You will notice that the dates are in the teens. The 11th, 13th, 17th. Relevant? Maybe.

I might be more inclined to note that the failures were on Mondays and Tuesdays – given that software upgrades are usually a weekend activity, it may be that we are seeing problems that don’t manifest themselves until the stress of weekday heavy traffic loads are applied.

Why would the April 17th outage have waited until a Tuesday? That was ‘Tax Day’ in the US, and perhaps the traffic loads were even higher in the rush to file. Sure enough, the outage last April was due to inadequate testing of a new storage system.

I think most of us would generally like to see more communications from our communications service supplier, especially when there are problems. As end users, we don’t seem to get lots of information out of the folks at RIM, but I’d want to hear how they are going to improve their test plans and procedures before boinking with live service.

These are somewhat fixable operational problems.

The bigger question may be whether the service architecture itself is flawed in allowing such catastrophic failures to occur in the first place.

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RIM, Blackberry