Writing in the Toronto Star recently about CBC’s decision to suspend comments for a month, Navneet Alang said “the social media era has upended some of our most cherished ideas around speech — and that guaranteeing someone a platform for their feedback isn’t just unnecessary, it’s actively harmful.”

His article includes themes that I have covered a number of times in the past, in such posts as “The fourth degree”, in which I reminded readers that comments are moderated on this platform.

Alang wrote:

At its ideal, the comment section under a story can correct mistakes, challenge assumptions, and give voice to what was not depicted or described.

That does indeed happen on Facebook sometimes, even today. But what you also get in those same comment boxes are wild conspiracy theories, baseless ravings, misogyny, racism, and other forms of hatred, both subtle and outright, and more. It is in short a toxic stew, one in which the beneficial aspects of comments come with considerable costs.

Uncivil discourse isn’t just found in comments sections of news articles. Recently, a Canadian university professor cancelled his Twitter account after he was called out for writing a number of antisemitic posts, although he was rewarded with a $2.5M grant by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, which apparently doesn’t care about unsocial behaviour by its recipients.

Last week, I observed that the discourse following the CRTC’s review of its error-filled 2019 wholesale rates decision has been over-the-top with inappropriate personal attacks, especially from anonymous accounts on Twitter. Since then, it seems to be getting worse, as these (often anonymous) commentators descend into old fashioned muck-raking which perversely accelerates the impression in the public’s mind that the CRTC lacks authority, integrity, and independence.

When such comments get amplified by official corporate blogs and Twitter accounts calling for the government to fire the Chair of the Commission, this serves to undermine the very concept of due process under the law. In Canada, if you don’t agree with a CRTC decision, there are 3 channels of appeal available; a coup d’état is not one of them.

Former CRTC vice-chair Michel Arpin wrote a reply to one of the attacks on the current CRTC chair, saying:

The decision was unanimous, no dissent by a group of 9 members. A fair number of these members have a telecom background particularly the two vice chairs who are long time civil servants having spent a major part of their career in telecommunications. So stop accusing Ian Scott.

As I wrote in April,

Confronted with inconvenient facts, apparently some people feel the need to resort to ad hominem attacks, rather than preserving the obscurity they so richly deserve.

I’m not offering a solution; I’m just finding there is some catharsis in venting.

Your comments are welcome.

When the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) reversed its own ill-conceived 2019 wholesale rates decision last month, the term “invest” shows up 56 times. “The Commission’s long-term objective in the wholesale HSA service market is to encourage competition and, in particular, facilities-based competition.”

And, when the federal Cabinet looked at that 2019 decision, it was also concerned about investment, warning:

On the basis of its review, the Governor in Council considers that the rates do not, in all instances, appropriately balance the policy objectives of the wholesale services framework and is concerned that these rates may undermine investment in high-quality networks, particularly in rural and remote areas.

Cabinet chose not to explicitly overturn the 2019 decision, saying “Given that the CRTC is already reviewing its decision, it is unnecessary to refer the decision back to the CRTC for reconsideration at this time.” But the message was clear in its August 2020 press release: “Canada’s future depends on connectivity”.

So, it should not have been a surprise that the Commission has continued nearly 30 years of support for facilities-based competition.

Since that May decision, there has been a steady stream of substantial investments announcements in major telecom infrastructure, for example:

• Bell: Bell’s biggest-ever network acceleration plan gets bigger with additional investment now up to $1.7 billion over the next 2 years;
• Rogers: When staying connected mattered most, Rogers enabled and enhanced connectivity to more than 1,000 communities across Canada, faster than at any time in company history;
• TELUS: TELUS unleashes Canada’s fastest Internet speeds and invests $2 billion to expand its fibre optic network in Calgary;
• SaskTel: SaskTel doubling its investment to bring advanced fibre optic broadband infrastructure to rural communities across Saskatchewan;
• among many, many more.

In its May 27, 2021 determination to vary its 2019 wholesale rates, the CRTC said “that making the interim rates final would further incent and foster investments and facilities-based competition.” Over the past month, Canada’s major facilities-based carriers have accelerated capital plans like never before.

The system is working.

Canada’s future depends on connectivity, and investment in connectivity is well underway.

Canada’s Parliamentary Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology, better known as “INDU” has released its report “Affordability and Accessibility of Telecommunications Services in Canada: Encouraging Competition to (Finally) Bridge the Digital Divide” [pdf, 3.5 MB].

The 68 page report is largely unintelligible gibberish, representing a complete waste of time for our Parliamentarians, the witnesses and the parties who prepared representations before the Committee. Seven of those pages are completely blank, so a little better than 10% of the report is useful as scratch paper. Not all of the witnesses who appeared are acknowledged in the report, and the list of submissions by parties is incomplete.

I note that the report is not tagged as a preliminary draft. It should be. The release of this report, in this condition, should not be considered one of the prouder moments for the INDU Committee.

Recommendation 3 is indecipherable:

That the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission establish an affordability standard for telecommunications services across Canada after consulting with various stakeholders, taking into account an affordability standard for wholesale Internet rates ensuring equitable treatment of network owners and virtual operators in order to significantly reduce the cost of bandwidth among providers, thereby encouraging more competition and reducing the price of consumer packages, and that it issue its decision within a year.

What does it mean to establish an “affordability standard” that takes into account a wholesale affordability standard?

Recommendation number 4 is also a beauty:

That the Government of Canada increase service costs by 50 cents for Canadians who are willing and able to afford the incurred cost in order to come to the aid of neighbors that can not afford high prices.

Isn’t that what we usually consider to be the role of government social benefits?

Recommendations 5 and 6 show that the committee clearly didn’t understand how government has completely failed lower income households in developing affordable connectivity solutions.

Recommendation 5
That the Government of Canada create a benefit for large band services until the end of the pandemic for low-income Canadians, seniors or Canadians who have lost their jobs during the pandemic.

Recommendation 6
That the Government of Canada change some of the parameters for the Connecting Families program to improve accessibility by, for example:

• Changing the eligibility criteria and better targeting families to ensure all low-income households have access to it;
• Requiring service providers to participate in the program and funding them directly; and
• Promoting programs more strategically so that more low-income families are aware of them.

Repeat after me: “Connecting Families is a private sector initiative.” And, as I wrote in “The broadband divide’s little secret”, research has shown that low prices aren’t enough to get more people online.

Oh, can someone tell me what the heck are these “large band services” in Recommendation 5?

Recommendation 12 is just plain silly:

That the Government of Canada put in place a variety of means to support improved connectivity in rural and remote areas. For example, it could:

• Provide financial support to help build infrastructure for carriers or service providers who are in areas where it is not economically beneficial for them to build it on their own in order to help reach the objective of providing an appropriate level of service;
• Ensure or promote competition in areas where there is only a small number of providers by allowing resale, allowing access to third parties to then provide services using the facilities of the incumbent

The first part, subsidizing rural builds, is precisely what governments have been doing since what seems like the beginning of time. The second part says the government should allow competition? Hello? Competition is already allowed by the Government of Canada. The CRTC also allows competition. It just doesn’t mandate certain types of competition, although it does mandate others. There is a difference between allowing competition and mandating resale. How could this committee not know the difference?

The report is, or at least should be, an embarrassment to the members of the committee and the staff who supported it. If I marked this as an undergraduate paper, I would assign a failing grade. It’s really not surprising given the political theatrics that took place during meetings seeking evidence for the report. Perhaps the quality of such studies would benefit from INDU Committee actually listening to witnesses and reading submissions to learn about subject areas, rather than trying to score cheap political points through ‘gotcha’ style cross-examination.

As it stands, the report is unworthy of the seal of the House of Commons coat of arms that adorns its cover page. Given the subject matter, “Affordability and Accessibility of Telecommunications Services in Canada”, that’s especially disappointing.

As I have described before, “When I studied statistics, we were told to look for “outliers” – results that appeared to be inconsistent with the rest of the data. If an observation is a potential outlier, you begin an analysis to determine whether a cause can be identified for the spurious result.”

There has been a lot of noise surrounding last month’s Telecom Decision CRTC 2021-181, the review and vary of the Commission’s 2019 Order (Telecom Order CRTC 2019-288) regarding final rates for aggregated wholesale high-speed access services.

The faux outrage alleges that the Commission has suddenly shown a predisposition favouring ‘facilities-based competition’ over ‘services-based’, when in fact, supporting investment has been the position of the CRTC, and the Competition Bureau, and various expert reports, and the Minister of Industry, (or ISED) for nearly 3 decades (since 1992).

So which decision is the outlier?

The discontinuity in wholesale rate policy was found in the rates set in 2019, not the most recent review of that decision issued in May of 2021. Following last summer’s determination by Cabinet (“Canada’s future depends on connectivity”), there should have been no surprise that the CRTC would need to carefully examine its 2019 determination.

It was pretty easy to see that the “outlier”, or statistical anomaly, in wholesale rate-setting was 2019, with hundreds of millions of dollars in windfall rebates and dramatically lowered forward-looking rates that have since been confirmed to be below the carriers’ costs. Looking at the 2019 rates, last August, Cabinet said “the Governor in Council considers that the rates do not, in all instances, appropriately balance the policy objectives of the wholesale services framework and is concerned that these rates may undermine investment in high-quality networks, particularly in rural and remote areas.”

Those who oppose the CRTC’s most recent decision argue that it leads to higher consumer prices. However, Bell Canada has asserted that its wholesale rates will drop by an average of 7%; in the case of wholesale rates from Canadian cable companies, some cost elements are increasing.

There was a time that the independent internet service providers celebrated the CRTC following its processes. Less than 2 years ago, CNOC recognized the need to balance a range of interests in reaching a decision. “The CRTC regulates the market to protect consumers and promote the public interest.”

CNOC’s own press release seemed to recognize that there are many more considerations involved in determining the “public interest” than simply lowering consumer prices. Indeed, there is a public interest cost associated with low, low prices as we have seen in other markets. Canada needs substantial levels of ongoing investment from the private sector to extend the reach of our networks into unserved and underserved areas. Setting wholesale rates too low can result in lowering incentives for rural investment, as I described, and as Canada’s Federal cabinet stated last August.

As CWTA President and CEO Robert Ghiz recently wrote, “Those who discount this balanced approach and argue in favour of one-dimensional policy-making willingly ignore the impact it would have on Canadians’ access to the internet and their ability to participate in the digital world.”

There has been a long-standing recognition that the most sustainable form of competition is found among those companies making the multi-billion dollar annual investments to “deploy, maintain and continually upgrade the physical networks that enable Canadians to connect to the internet.”

For nearly 30-years, Canada’s policy and regulatory frameworks have consistently favoured policies that support investment by facilities-based carriers. Independent ISPs have been able to thrive in this environment, continuing to gain market share with the wholesale rates that were set in 2016 and re-affirmed last month. Wholesale-based ISPs have grown nearly 50% between 2016 and 2019 (the last year covered by official data); with a 10% market share, independent ISPs are attracting about 20% of new customer growth, with the 2016 rates in place.

It is somewhat disingenuous for independent ISPs to endorse the CRTC and its processes when the Commission rules in their favour but call for regulatory reform and heads to roll at the CRTC when determinations go the other way. The Telecom Act has provisions that enable reviews and appeals of decisions.

The system works.

Canada’s future continues to depend on connectivity. Increasing connectivity depends on regulatory stability and a policy environment that continues to favour investment.

Earlier this week, I wrote about our need for more “non-virtual reality” in the form of genuine, face-to-face human interaction as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The International Telecommunications Society is presenting a webinar on June 29 that looks at “Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse”, examining Deepfakes.

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence scanned images of a person to be transformed into new video images to place them in scenarios and situations that never actually happened. Combined with voice and sound manipulation, the results can be convincing.

So-called ‘Deep Fakes’ are not only a real threat for democracy but they take the manipulation of voters to new levels. They will also affect ordinary people. This crisis of misinformation we are facing has been dubbed the ‘Infocalypse’.

In this presentation, Nina Schick will reveal shocking examples of Deep Fakery and explain the dangerous political consequences of the Infocalypse, both in terms of national security and what it means for public trust in politics. She will also examine what it means for us as individuals and what we need to do to prepare and protect ourselves. Too often we build the cool technology and ignore what bad guys can do with it before we start playing catch-up. But when it comes to Deep Fakes, we urgently need to be on the front foot.

Nina Schick is an author, advisor and speaker, specializing in how technology is transforming geopolitics and society, and helping organizations and businesses understand and navigate technological changes.

See you June 29.