The freedom to associate with who ever you want to is a pretty fundamental civil right. In Canada, that freedom is found in Section 2d of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In the US, the right is established by the first amendment.

By no means am I a constitution expert.

I like to ensure that people examine issues from both sides now, from win and lose, from up and down and still somehow… sorry, that was another Canadian.

A hot news story is how the US National Security Agency has been looking at people’s phone records. Some are arguing that this constitutes unreasonable search and seizure. People are up in arms. I find it fascinating that people don’t mind their phone company having this information, or that someone working in a call centre half-way around the world can look at your calling patterns. But, not the people who take an oath of office to defend and protect you.

Have we seen too many movies?

Let me just note that both the Canadian Charter and US Fourth Amendment use the modifier ‘unreasonable’ in front of ‘search and seizure’. Both countries modify the freedom of assembly with the adjective ‘peaceful’. So, neither right is absolute. Both sides now.

These are different times. When we read that the UK had identified the transit bombers in advance but did not act because of resources, one wonders if people would have preferred that there had been no surveillance at all.

Why am I weighing in on this? It appears to me to have telecom policy issues associated with it although clearly this is an area better kept for real lawyers – not those of us trained for the NY criminal bar by distance learning – otherwise known as watching Law & Order.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll state that my politics on this subject are likely skewed in part by having one of my kids attending school in a part of the world that sees more than its fair share of terrorism. Is any amount fair?

It’s interesting for me to try to figure out who reads these postings. Sometimes I wonder if it is simply cathartic – not a bad thing, of course.

Clearly, the internal website team at the CRTC does not read my blog. Otherwise, they would never have posted a note on their site today:

Not after yesterday’s commentary about The Xanga Tango. With one weekend’s power interruption, the CRTC goes to 99.5% availability – two 9’s. That’s if nothing else happens all year – and we know the chances of that!

I guess that Canada’s regulatory departments just can forget about access to the archives this weekend. Take the weekend off. Miller time. There’s nothing important happening anyway. Oh yeah, there was something I read recently about an abbreviated schedule for the VoIP reconsideration. Wait ’til you get through reading the Sunday papers. No problem.

I understand that government security regulations may stand in the way of using off-site third party hosting. Otherwise, there are a lot of carriers and hosting companies that could provide guaranteed up-times, redundant 4-barrel, overhead cam, turbo-charged, gonkulators and all that.

Maybe the CRTC and Public Works can take a look at finding a secure site, somewhere in Canada, to provide business grade hosting services that don’t need to go off the air for 42 hours at a time. By the way, the folks who can help build that for you will be speaking on Wednesday afternoon, June 14 at The Canadian Telecom Summit.

I know, it’s a shameless plug. Hey, this is my blog and it is cathartic. I told you.

Michael Geist has been reminding us that, with other issues like net neutrality (among others) grabbing people’s interest, the scourge of spam is perhaps forgotten but hardly gone away.

My ISP uses two different filter systems to try to minimize the amount of spam I receive. Last week, the ISP successfully blocked 835 messages, perhaps costing me the opportunity to save a lot on prescriptions from Canada and leaving my wife without the benefit of me purchasing chemical performance enhancements. My PC filtered another couple hundred messages.

I am actually far more concerned about filters blocking legitimate mail – I had 10 messages blocked that should not have tripped the filters. Ten people who thought I was ignoring their urgent requests for information. To them I say – sorry. I promise, if I want to ignore you, I’ll do it to your face.

How do we address spam in legislation? Defining it is one problem. Effectively stopping it, instead of simply chasing the spammer off-shore, is another. As I wrote last week, we shouldn’t legislate etiquette. I think that a democracy gives you the right to be merely offensive and annoying – otherwise, my brother would say that I should have been put behind bars years ago.

Where would you draw the line?

I was just minding my own business, surfing around various blogs in a lonely search for voices of reason when I tripped across a blog hosted by Xanga.com: the self-proclaimed “Weblog Community”. The site came up with the following message:

Seriously! This was really posted.

Now, when I first saw this message, it didn’t have the correction to the original 4 pm target for restoration, nor the ‘P.S.’. And I don’t know if the 7 pm time is going to be met.

But, hello Xanga: This is no way to run a hosting service!

Your operations team has actually wasted a lot of effort in moving out of your old location. Hopefully, you no longer have a space problem. Any of your customers with half a brain have left and found a service provider that actually takes their clients’ needs into consideration.

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Update: As of 5:15pm, Xanga appears to be back in service. The Xanga.com home page has a note that appears to have been posted yesterday, warning folks that the service would be down until 2 pm.

I’m guessing that most of their customers are on the free service. And they are getting exactly what they are paying for in service quality. But I’m willing to bet that they support Net Neutrality!

I had hoped to take a longer break from the theme of Net Neutrality, but a piece on Om Malik’s blog by Daniel Berninger seems to be screaming for a reply. Berninger hails from Tier 1 Research; his credentials show a close association with Jeff Pulver’s Free World Dialup, and hence a piece that is sympathetic to the ‘Save the Internet‘ movement.

His legalistically styled piece attempts to suggest that, in the absence of conformance to network neutrality principles, telephone companies will lose their common carrier status and therefore should lose their access to low cost rights-of-way. Good try, Dan.

He defines network neutrality as

If that is the legal definition being proposed, then I think we have no problem. Telecom carriers on both sides of the border (and generally around the world) are used to non-discriminatory provisions in their Telecom Acts.

The problem, I think, is that most Net Neutrality advocates aren’t really interested in just non-discrimination. They are really looking for non-differentiation.

Non-discrimination means that every similarly situated user has an equal opportunity to purchase a given product with a given grade of service or quality.

Non-differentiation would mean that every bit of traffic has an equal opportunity to go through the network without any ability to differentiate or apply priorities. All bits would be treated the same.

Non-differentiation clauses can’t be found in any Acts. They make no sense.

I think that we want more than just vanilla flavoured internet. Some of us want extra-rich and creamy internet. Others want cheap, store-brand no-frills internet. I like soft-serve chocolate internet (in a cup, not a cone – it’s the low-carb thing). Non-discrimination means that everyone has a right to buy the same kind of ice cream that I can buy. But nowhere does it say that you get to buy extra-rich ice cream for the same price as no-frills. Nor does it say that my grocery store can’t get an incentive in order to offer premium ice cream for the same price.

I think that we want our electronic financial trading transactions to have higher priority than our movie and music downloads. If you (or banks or brokers) don’t want to pay a little more for that kind of service – no problem. But you are then choosing to take the risk associated with those bits getting slowed down by traffic jams. Why can’t we pay for access to the express lanes?¹

If my bank or broker wants to provide me a better quality guarantee for their website as part of their service, why is this evil? They should be able to buy the telecom services to support their objectives. Same for any other content provider.

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¹ Tim Wu’s metaphor of having express lanes reserved solely for GM cars is extreme. The better metaphor is a toll road versus a freeway – many cities have them. You can bet that not all the users are paying the tolls themselves – their employers want them to get to work or between jobs faster. That isn’t discrimination – anyone willing to pay the price can ride in those lanes, regardless of who pays. And if GM or an oil company wants to offer a subscription to the toll lanes as an incentive to buy their products … ?