It was completely predictable that Toronto would fail to deliver a timely solution to the appeals for broadband for its most vulnerable citizens. Indeed, I predicted it a year ago, right after Toronto City Council greenlighted a silly proposal for the city to build its own fibre-based ISP in what is already one of the most connected cities in Canada.

In presenting its plan for “Affordable Internet Connectivity for All”, the proponents for ConnectTO lined up representatives from ACORN Canada, a community union of low and moderate income people, who passionately argued “The programs need to be put in place now, not tomorrow. Now.”

The plan approved by Toronto’s City Council won’t do a thing now, tomorrow, next month or even this summer. It isn’t even clear that it will deliver on ACORN’s needs when it is launched sometime late this year or in 2022. Or ever for that matter.

It took the City until the end of September to issue an RFP; responses were due in mid-November. At the time it approved the plan, item 10 said: “City Council request the Chief Technology Officer to report back to the Executive Committee by end of 2021 to provide an update on digital equity, digital access and municipal broadband.” According to a news release from January 2021, the first target areas for ConnectTO were “expected to be live starting in late 2021.” The news release also called for “a report back to Council at the end of 2021” prior to “Phase 2 of the project plans to see the network launched city-wide starting in early 2022.”

I have been unable to find such a report. Here we are a year later, two years into the pandemic, and there is nothing to show for the people who needed immediate help.

City Council saw people hungry for internet connectivity. Rather than provide them with vouchers for an immediate solution, the City decided to look into building a city-owned and operated network, piloted in one neighbourhood. The city wants to build a new network, in an area that already has lots of available broadband connectivity.

Nearly four and a half years ago, in November 2017, Toronto’s CIO and GM of Economic Development and Culture wrote, “In Toronto nearly 100% of households have ‘access’ but this refers only to the necessary infrastructure being in place. In practice, access depends on affordability.”

Toronto didn’t then, and doesn’t now, have a problem with access to internet facilities. Toronto’s problem was (and still is) with adoption of service.

Toronto City Council didn’t ask the right questions of its CTO and those providing deputations. As such, ConnectTO wasn’t the right answer.

Toronto lost sight of the most important requirement for the solution.

“The programs need to be put in place now, not tomorrow. Now.”

For a while now, I have expressed concerns with Canada’s plans to regulate internet content. Over the past month, those concerns have not been assuaged.

I do not believe, and have never subscribed to the view, that the internet should be a lawless platform, immune from application of laws. “Taming the wild west” is a post of mine from March 2006. My concern has been in crafting and attempting to tailor new laws and creating new standards of acceptable behaviour for digital media. We have laws and a body of jurisprudence in their application to the analog world.

A recent editorial in the Sunday New York Times was entitled “Canada’s Trucker Protests Are a Test of Democracy” [February 13, 2022]. “We disagree with the protesters’ cause, but they have a right to be noisy and even disruptive. Protests are a necessary form of expression in a democratic society, particularly for those whose opinions do not command broad popular support.”

From their vantage point in New York, or from my suburban home in the Toronto area, I acknowledge that it is a lot easier to comment on the inconveniences and disruptions to everyday life in Ottawa from horns and street closures. As the Times writes, “The challenge for public officials is to maintain a balance between public health and safety and a functioning society, with the right to free expression.”

Where do we draw the line? I’m not sure about the line itself, but it seems to me we witnessed some examples of “free expression” that are pretty clearly on the wrong side of the line. Protests that disrupts border crossings, at a cost in the order of half a billion dollars a day in trade, crossed the line, in my view. Protests that close a major vaccine centre in Ottawa crossed the line, in my view. Defecating on the porch of a private residence crossed the line, in my view.

A few weeks ago, I wrote, “It seems to me that how Canada deals with the Ottawa protest can be a barometer for how Canadians might view government intervention in online content.”

Support for “Freedom of Expression” and “Freedom of Peaceful Assembly” is indeed easy when you agree with what is being said. How do we deal with controversial points of view? If the way our municipal, provincial, and federal governments dealt with the protests are indeed a barometer for trusting government to deal appropriately with online content, would most Canadians say that we passed the test?

There is already legislation on the books to deal with the most troublesome content on the internet. As, such, we need to be very careful in new definitions of what constitutes online harms. Similar to questions being raised about Canada’s declaration of invoking the Emergencies Act, could other laws, if actually enforced, do the job?

I have quoted Aaron Sorkin’s The American President before, but it is such a great line, I’ll repeat it again: “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.”

Shouldn’t more effort be focused on teaching critical thinking, teaching school kids how to process information online, including checking and verifying “news” and “facts” being shared on social media? That has been the approach in Finland, as described in articles over the past year or so in The Telegraph and The Guardian. “With democracies around the world threatened by the seemingly unstoppable onslaught of false information, Finland – recently rated Europe’s most resistant nation to fake news – takes the fight seriously enough to teach it in primary school.”

Finland’s approach isn’t a quick fix. Investing in digital literacy in kindergarten and primary schools means playing the long game. But, aren’t critical thinking, and digital literacy, among the most needed skills to better prepare the country for life in the digital information age?

Perhaps, it is another way to develop a generation of better informed infomediaries.

Early in my career, I had a boss at AT&T Bell Labs who taught the importance of getting involved in our local communities.

He said that all of our neighbours were potential customers of AT&T and he wanted them to see that it was a good employer, and that its employees gave back to the community. Not only was community involvement the right thing to do, but he felt that it was ultimately good for the business for us to take time to get involved in activities outside of work. What we did outside of AT&T would reflect on what kind of company we worked for.

The reflection in that mirror works both ways.

I also learned a lot about the importance of diversity and inclusion in that job. We had programs to go into inner city schools to stimulate interest in math and science, to try to increase the number of young kids who might pursue those disciplines in high school and in university. The objective was to have a pool of candidate employees that were a better reflection of the markets we served. We were playing the long game.

In those days, I worked alongside doctoral physicists, graduates from music programs, geography majors, as well as the usual academic disciplines of computer science and electrical engineering. When we were building conference calling services, we ideally wanted the interface to make sense for our customers, not just the computer science people who built it.

I told you that story in order to provide background for the rest of this blog post.

Last week, I read “Women in science, engineering ‘essential'” in The Kingston Whig Standard. In the article, Heidi Ploeg, Queen’s University’s Chair for Women in Engineering, said “Engineers work on solving problems. If we don’t have a diverse set of people working on the problems, we aren’t going to ask the right questions or solve the right problems, and we’re not going to come up with the best answers.”

I agree.

And fortunately, there is a program and bursary to help enable the pursuit of training, professional development, or academic programs for women in the telecommunications field. The Women of STAC Bursary Fund awards up to $5500 to support women in telecommunications. In addition to monetary support, the bursary recipients receive an invitation to participate at the annual STAC Conference, taking place this year from March 28-30, in which they can gain valuable learning opportunities through various sessions as well as network with STAC members.

Under the STAC umbrella, there is a Women of STAC Mentorship Program, with a “goal of offering guidance, support, and personal & professional development to women in the telecommunications industry”.

Last year, I wrote about STAC, Canada’s Structure, Tower and Antenna Council. STAC represents the people who are actually building Canada’s advanced digital networks.

I hope you will join me in encouraging women to apply for the Women of STAC Bursary Fund. “If we don’t have a diverse set of people working on the problems, we aren’t going to ask the right questions or solve the right problems.”

I also hope you will take a look at participating in this year’s virtual conference in late March.

The latest edition of Telecom Policy included an article (“Determinants of internet use by school-age children: The challenges for Mexico during the COVID-19 pandemic” [pdf, 1.5MB]) that I found interesting. Although the study examined challenges in a developing country, I think there are lessons for us in Canada.

We often associate the challenges of universal internet with access, a supply-side issue; and with adoption, a demand-side issue. The Mexican study examines other demand-side issues and also discusses a third dimension, benefits, to examine factors impacting the utility of internet use.

I have written frequently about most governments’ focus on access, developing and funding programs to stimulate investment in infrastructure to ensure that broadband service is available universally.

As Canada moves toward addressing the second tier, we have seen industry developed programs, designed to aid with broadband affordability. However, it is important to note that the study found income isn’t the only factor impacting adoption, as operators of Canada’s low-income broadband programs can attest. As I wrote in “The broadband divide’s little secret”, lower prices aren’t enough to get people to connect.

The Mexico study found that internet access and use depends on level of schooling, economic status, digital skills, and place of residence, as well as the presence of electronic devices and infomediaries in the household. As discussed in the paper, there are “two essential factors that determine the acceptance of technology: perceived utility; and, ease of use.” As a result, the paper should encourage us to examine other factors to stimulate internet adoption, and expand the way we look at some of the typical variables.

For example, income isn’t simply a determinant of affordability of internet access services; income also influences the ability to buy goods and services over the internet, a key part of the perceived utility required for technology acceptance. Similarly, increasing digital skills capabilities helps to diversify the user’s online activities “such as electronic commerce, banking, information seeking, and interaction with the government.” The paper discusses the value of “infomediaries” defined as people who are available (preferably within the household) to facilitate internet use for those lacking the skills to do so on their own.

The study shows that use of the internet at school can be an important factor for household adoption, use, and benefits. While most of the private sector programs associated with Connecting Families targeted affordable broadband for low-income households with children, we might wonder if more can be done, perhaps integrating such programs within the school system to help develop the school kids as household infomediaries.

Can schools and school-kids help sell the utility of broadband connectivity to technology-wary parents in underserved households?

Last week, the Government of Canada released a report on “What We Heard: The Government’s proposed approach to address harmful content online”, summarizing the feedback received from its consultation last summer.

I think it is worth reproducing the “Key Takeaways and Executive Summary” in its entirety:

Key Takeaways and Executive Summary
On July 29th, 2021, the Government of Canada published a legislative and regulatory proposal to confront harmful content online for consultation on its website. Interested parties were invited to submit written comments to the Government via email.

Feedback both recognized the proposal as a foundation upon which the Government could build and identified a number of areas of concern.

There was support from a majority of respondents for a legislative and regulatory framework, led by the federal government, to confront harmful content online.

Specifically, respondents were largely supportive of the following elements of the proposed regime:

• A framework that would apply to all major platforms;
• The exclusion of private and encrypted communications and telecommunications services;
• Accessible and easy-to-use flagging mechanisms and clear appeal processes for users;
• The need for platform transparency and accountability requirements;
• The creation of new regulatory machinery to administer and enforce the regime;
• Ensuring that the regulatory scheme protects Canadians from real-world violence emanating from the online space; and
• The need for appropriate enforcement tools to address platform non-compliance.

However, respondents identified a number of overarching concerns including concerns related to the freedom of expression, privacy rights, the impact of the proposal on certain marginalized groups, and compliance with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms more generally.

These overarching concerns were connected to a number of specific elements of the proposal. Respondents specifically called for the Government to reframe and reconsider its approach to the following elements:

• Apart from major platforms, what other types of online services would be regulated and what the threshold for inclusion would be;
• What content moderation obligations, if any, would be placed on platforms to reduce the spread of harmful content online, including the 24-hour removal provision and the obligation for platforms to proactively monitor their services for harmful content;
• The independence and oversight of new regulatory bodies;
• What types of content would be captured by the regime and how that content would be defined in relation to existing criminal law;
• The proposed compliance and enforcement tools, including the blocking power; and
• Mandatory reporting of content to law enforcement and national security agencies or preservation obligations.

Though respondents recognized that this initiative is a priority, many voiced that key elements of the proposal need to be re-examined. Some parties explained that they would require more specificity in order to provide informed feedback and that a lack of definitional detail would lead to uncertainty and unpredictability for stakeholders.

Respondents signaled the need to proceed with caution. Many emphasized that the approach Canada adopts to addressing online harms would serve as a benchmark for other governments acting in the same space and would contribute significantly to international norm setting.

The issue of dealing with online harms is a priority for this government; it is set out in the objectives within the mandate letters for 2 Cabinet Ministers. But, the issues are complex and it appears the government – a minority government – is proceeding cautiously.

There are models for Canada to examine in other jurisdictions. Last week, the UK announced that it would be strengthening its online harms legislation to target revenge porn, hate crime, fraud, the sale of illegal drugs or weapons, the promotion or facilitation of suicide, people smuggling and sexual exploitation (terrorism and child sexual abuse were already included).

As I asked last week, how do we ensure that actions to deal with online harms are consistent with Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication”?

I wrote in late January, “those crafting new laws need to maintain a careful balance… ‘If we do nothing these problems will only get worse. Our children will pay the heaviest price.'”