According to CTV, the Manitoba government will be introducing legislation to require ISPs to report any detection of child pornography.
Many of the large ISPs have voluntarily started to block access to child abuse content that is identified as part of Project Cleanfeed Canada. This legislation appears to be the first time that ISPs will be required to act.
All kinds of questions that emerge – including provincial authority over what is normally a federal undertaking, that is, telecommunications content; does this represent a change in the traditional common carrier defense for ISPs; etc.
I’ll update with a link to the legislation when it is available.
Update [November 28, 5:50 pm] The Manitoba Government press release has a few more details about Bill 7 (The Child and Family Services Amendment Act) – also available in pdf.
Industry Canada has issued a media advisory for “an important announcement” to be released by Minister Jim Prentice today, shortly after the markets close at 4:00 pm today.
Will this be the announcement of the rules on the AWS spectrum auction?
The level of public discourse has been accelerating, with an OpEd in today’s pages of The Financial Post by Martin Masse, a former policy advisor to Minister Bernier.
[Today, I offer a guest article written by Alex Goldberg – a student at Queen’s University. Traffic shaping isn’t just an issue for commercial ISPs.]
During the last week of the semester, it is not uncommon to see a bulk of students at Stauffer Library pounding away at their term papers or reports. In my case, I am polishing off a poster presentation on my Honours research project. Most students use the library as a venue with minimal or limited distraction; all of the necessary resources for research are available, between electronic and physical texts, as well as a general atmosphere conducive to study.
Like most universities, Queen’s provides free wireless internet access at all of its libraries. This provides access to electronic academic resources available exclusively to Queen’s students, as well as resources in the public domain. However, the network provided by Queen’s is also used extensively for file sharing between students on the network.
The legality and legitimacy of file sharing aside, I don’t believe that downloading the latest Futurama episode should take precedence over one’s access to academic materials, especially on a university campus.
Unfortunately, the capacity of the university network is limited. On several occasions, I have found that my connection deteriorates considerably during peak usage times. In fact, the bulk of this post was written during periods that I’ve been waiting for pages to load. While the ideal solution to the problem would be to expand the university network’s infrastructure and to increase capacity, there are obvious costs associated with it, let alone the time and energy required to implement such a change at a public institution.
Packet prioritization is an issue for more than just the commercial ISPs; capacity constraints affect university campus networks as well. Since there is a limit to the capacity of the university network, most would agree that research and access to basic information should take precedence over downloading for personal entertainment.
While the end goal should be to expand network capacity and make all information easily available, the immediate needs can be addressed by implementing packet prioritization.
Last Friday, the CRTC must have been caught up in the holiday spirit unleashed by all of those post-Thanksgiving sales south of the border. All those ads for “buy one, get one free” just don’t seem to be as prevalent here.
As of last week, a regulatory constraint for deals on telecom services has been lifted. The Commission released a Decision that removed the need for ILECs to get approval for what could be considered any reasonable bundle of services.
In essence,
the bundling rules, including the requirement to file and obtain Commission approval for a tariff, no longer apply with respect to bundles in which the retail price at least equals the sum of the rates of all retail tariffed services included in the bundle.
So, a bundle can include one or more components that are still regulated, and as long as the price for the bundle is at least as high as the tariff price, no CRTC approval is required.
What could this mean for consumers? In areas that still have price regulation for local service, watch for deals that throw in a little internet here and there. Maybe a side order of discounted wireless, as long as you keep your basic residential service.
The relaxation of the bundling rules could mean even more for business users. Telcos have had a more difficult time responding in a timely fashion to special requirements set out in RFPs because many such arrangements needed regulatory approval.
The relaxation of the bundling rules could mean that pricing for business services will be getting more competitive.
I mentioned that I saw Dave Caputo last week at the Scotia Capital investor event.
When we spoke, Dave reminded me that Sandvine wrote a white paper nearly 3 years ago – long before many of us had even heard the term Net Neutrality, let alone formed an opinion about it.
The white paper provides a different perspective on the term, suggesting that carrier management of traffic ensures true network neutrality by means of fair allocation of limited network resources between potentially competing uses of the network. The paper speaks of the Tragedy of the Commons.
When too many owners are endowed with the privilege to use a given resource, the resource is prone to overuse and eventual depletion or destruction.
Individual subscribers are concerned about maximizing their own personal utility of the broadband service. There is no incentive for the subscriber to moderate their use of the network without some form of feedback via the service plan definition, cost, structure and enforcement.
Of course, Sandvine provides tools to network operators that provide visibility into the traffic, enabling them to control the allocation of ‘common’ resources between subscribers, applications, and content providers. The objective is to maximize the utility of the network.
