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With a certain degree of poetic license, I am continuing to use lyrics from Joni Mitchell’s Circle Game as the title of my year-end wrap-up. Add 50 to the title to get a more realistic picture of where I am at.

Sixteen springs and sixteen summers gone now
Cartwheels turn to car wheels thru the town
And they tell him take your time it won’t be long now
Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down

No. I am not ready to slow those circles down. There still seems to be so much to get done.

This past year has been somewhat challenging, so in many ways I will be happy to turn the page in the calendar. Aside: Will my grandkids understand that metaphor? Our family is particularly grateful for the miracles enabled and delivered to us over the past year thanks to pharmaceutical and medical research. At the same time, we are deeply pained by horrors of the terrorist attack of October 7, and the global rise of overt antisemitism.

I have family in the Middle East. It is disturbing to see the number of people who seem uninformed, or misinformed about what triggered the war. And, that provides an appropriate segue to one of the main themes of this year-end post.

Improved access to quality information is the presumptive raison d’être for Canada’s Online News Act, Bill C-18. While I understand the motivation behind the legislation, as I have written, its implementation was badly fumbled.

Unfortunately, I am concerned that this is another case of government focus on the supply side without consideration of factors impacting demand. With all the best funding in the world to create better news, are we doing enough work to ensure there is a market to consume that news? Just as I have frequently complained about our work on broadband, we seem to be better at stimulating supply, and rely upon a Field of Dreams hope for the demand side. What if you build it and they don’t come? There are a number of ways to improve funding for news, but how does that help deliver quality information to a generation who don’t watch linear TV, and don’t pick up a newspaper, or rely upon news websites?

What do we do if we provide funding to create high quality local and national newsrooms, but a generation of consumers rely on 30-second high-energy video clips where adherence to facts isn’t valued as highly as the entertainment quality by the search algorithms?

Will digital literacy training in elementary and secondary schools include teaching how to differentiate between information, misinformation, and disinformation? How can we create more sophisticated consumers of high quality content?

Dealing with supply side issues is relatively easy. In most cases, if you throw enough money at the problem, it gets solved, whether it is building broadband, funding newsrooms, creating quality Canadian media content. Dealing with the demand side is much more challenging. What do we do when Canada’s universal broadband objectives are met, but more than a million people remain off-line? The issue of driving increased adoption will need to be a carry-over from my 2023 agenda into next year.

Being well informed is an important prerequisite for responsible leaders. Helping you stay informed is one of the reasons I added 98 blog posts to “Telecom Trends” over the course of 2022, continuing to write around 2 posts per week. There are more than 3260 posts in the archives (fully searchable). In 2023, I migrated my weekly newsletter to a new platform. You can subscribe here.

As I have said in the past, it is my objective for this blog to be a source of quality information on Canadian telecom policy, with occasional gastronomical diversions. In each case, I am trying to share elements of my expertise accumulated over decades.

I look forward to engaging with you in the New Year, readying for yet another spring and summer.

I wish you and your families a happy, healthy, safe and peaceful holiday season.

Would more sophisticated content consumers help Canada avoid the need to implement online harms restrictions?

In early 2022, I described Finland’s approach, teaching school kids how to process information online, including checking and verifying “news” and “facts” being shared on social media. As the Daily Telegraph wrote at the time, “Teaching and learning about media literacy and critical thinking is a life-long journey. It starts at kindergartens and continues at elementary schools, high schools and universities”.

While the Canadian government has been under pressure to introduce its long-promised Online Harms bill, I continue to wonder if more effort should be focused on teaching critical thinking skills in Canada.

I am doubtful that the government should be in the business of determining what content should be blocked. This current government is not qualified to block information that it judges to be “misinformation”; as I pointed out in late October, the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and Minister of Innovation all circulated incorrect information that inflamed antisemitism. How can this government judge others’ content, when their own information has been harmful.

I am not a fan of technology specific legislation. At the same time, it is reasonable to expect that content that is considered illegal in print media should continue to be considered illegal in digital form.

It is extremely challenging to try to block content that is determined to be harmful. Blocking the content in one location will simply create an incentive for the content to emerge somewhere else. It becomes a never ending game of whack-a-mole.

In a recent article on The Hub, Richard Stursberg calls for “the news industry to decouple from social media”, saying “Much of social media is a sewer, polluted with content that claims to be true but is, in fact, disinformation and fake news.” The article claims that credible news gets judged by the company it is keeping on social media, compromising Canadians’ confidence, resulting in less trust for traditional news.

Under the circumstances, the best course might be for the news industry to simply leave social media. It could then set up its own platform, access to which would only be granted to firms that subscribed to a tough code of journalistic ethics like those in place for the CBC, the Globe and Mail, and CTV.

I am not as confident as the author that “It would be a simple matter to set up such a platform.”

Instead, what if we try to develop a society filled with more sophisticated content consumers? Can we create a series of school curricula, from kindergarten through university, to improve digital and media literacy and develop critical thinking?

Such a project would be a long term investment.

The Oxford Internet Institute recently released a study of nearly 12,000 children in the United States, that found no evidence that screen time impacted their brain function or well-being. The abstract for the full study said there were two hypotheses being tested: that functional brain organization is related to digital screen engagement; and, that children with higher rates of engagement will have functional brain organization profiles related to maladaptive functioning. “Results did not support either of these predictions for [screen media activity].”

While some schools boards have been considering whether to remove screens from classrooms, I wonder if a better approach is to focus on programs that teach improved digital literacy skills, learning how to differentiate between good information and bad, and helping kids become more informed consumers of digital content.

Can such programs help innoculate Canadians against a wide variety of online harms, including online hate, fraud, misinformation and disinformation?

Creating more sophisticated content consumers will require a longer time horizon with more patience required to implement, but will it deliver a better outcome than trying to legislate government controls on freedoms of expression?

A report from PwC Canada takes a new look at the state of telecom affordability in Canada.

According to “Understanding the affordability of wireless and wireline services in Canada” [26-page pdf, 7.7MB] focuses on assessing three elements of Canadian telecommunications affordability:

1. Canadian economics statistics, including telecommunications expenditure, inflation, and changing incomes.
2. The assessment of wireless and wireline affordability in Canada, including assessing the changing prices of wireless and wireline services over time relative to increases in data consumption and changing patterns of data usage.
3. The affordability of wireless and wireline services for Canadians against consumption and income metrics relative to global jurisdictions.

What did PwC find?

• Canadians have been impacted by inflation, with inflation in 2021 and 2022 surpassing the rate of income growth. Prior to 2021, incomes were growing faster than inflation for every quintile except the highest.
• Between 2017 and 2021, cellular services was the second largest CPI drop among the only 13 deflationary goods and services in the CPI bucket, falling at a CAGR of 8.1%. Driven by the decrease in cellular service CPI, communications was also a deflationary service, with communications CPI falling by 16% from 2017 to 2022.
• Affordability increased for all quintiles when assessing the cost of entry-level wireless and wireline plans against adjusted disposable incomes. Notably, for the lowest income quintile, the affordability of entry-level wireline plans improved by 11% between 2017 and 2021, while wireless affordability improved by 39%.
• The price per gigabyte of wireless and wireline data fell by over a 19% CAGR in Canada from 2017 to 2021. This is attributed to increases in data consumption significantly outpacing changes in prices, with data consumption growing at CAGRs of 24% for wireless and 28% for wireline. Among selected international peers, Canada has the second-lowest cost per gigabyte of wireline data.
• The affordability of wireless and wireline services in Canada is on par with peer countries. As the CPI of Canadian communications has dropped, it has brought the price of services in line with international peers as a percentage of income, indicating relative affordability.
• Together, the Canadian market and international analyses demonstrate that facilities-based competition in Canada is able to maintain a healthy telecommunications industry while delivering on network coverage, quality, and affordability

Earlier this year, I wrote, “Affordability is a complex and multifaceted concept that varies depending on the context and the goods or services being considered.”

The report looks at telecom affordability across various income quintiles, but it did not explicitly include a discussion of targeted affordable services such as the industry-led Connecting Families initiative. It is worth noting that Rogers recently introduced its Connected for Success 5G Wireless Program, promised as a benefit of the Shaw acquisition, and it has rolled out its broadband Connected for Success to the former Shaw footprint. TELUS offers Mobility for Good, among other targeted services, as I have described.

The PwC report lays out a fact-based narrative on telecom affordability in Canada, and paints a very different picture from the conventional wisdom.

Many of us have come to expect constant connectivity.

I don’t mean we necessarily want to be online 24/7, with a screen in front of our face around-the-clock. But, we want to be able to be connected whenever we want, wherever we happen to be.

Constant connectivity.

Most of us have phones that are effectively able to serve as mobile offices, equipped with word processing and other business apps. Personally, I find spreadsheets painful to navigate on my 5-inch screen, but I frequently edit blog posts and documents from waiting rooms or restaurants. We have tablets, computers, smart TVs, smart speakers, thermostats all connected to our home internet. As I write this, my home router reports 33 devices are connected. (I don’t have many of the “smart home” devices that are increasingly commonplace).

On our mobile networks, in addition to our smartphones, we have metering and other forms of telemetry. With home security and health applications, we increase the need for reliability, often using wireless backup for wireline connections. There are many working groups talking about connected autonomous vehicles.

This state of constant connectivity carries with it a variety of implications.

Many applications can be designed to tolerate hiccups in their connections. For example, by their very nature, email messages are transmitted on a ‘store and forward’ basis. A delay measured in tens of seconds or even minutes or hours is somewhat meaningless for most messages. It is silly to be concerned about a sub-second delay for emails or most text messaging. Most streaming video applications are designed to buffer the signal, storing multiple seconds of content on your device in anticipation of possible interruptions. But, what about voice and two way video calling? Delays (latency) of more than a few hundred milliseconds can be challenging for many who are used to virtually instantaneous responses in a normal conversation. We can witness the uncomfortable user experience when foreign news correspondents are having on-air communications with anchors using satellite connections.

What about performance issues with applications requiring non-stop high performance connectivity, such as remote surgery?

Connected vehicles is a category that enables us to understand a wide range of performance requirements, just in connecting a car. What kind of network performance should be anticipated by developers of connected car applications? The performance characteristics will vary based on whether the connectivity is used for navigation, entertainment, diagnostics, accident avoidance, or telemetry for vehicle maintenance (among other applications).

For many applications, constant connectivity may not have to be quite so constant.

Over the past few years, I have frequently referred to the tension between quality, coverage and price in architecting networks. Increases in coverage, or improvements in performance are always possible, but there is a cost associated with each. That cost ultimately would need to be recovered.

Do regulation and policy recognize that not all bits need to be treated the same?

How should variances in technical requirements receive consideration when examining network resilience from a regulatory perspective?

How do we ensure that appropriate incentives are in place to encourage continued investment in networks for improved reach, robust network resilience, increased capacity and more advanced capabilities?

What is the cost of misinformation?

We know that there is a real societal cost associated with viral misinformation, but what price do purveyors pay to spread their messages?

It turns out, it is pretty cheap. according to a recent article in Fortune, “For as little as $7, TikTok users can garner thousands of views on TikTok, opening a low-cost pathway to spread propaganda on hot-button topics.” The article discusses a surge in social media misinformation triggered by the Middle East conflict.

In Canada, we have seen senior politicians spreading misinformation in poorly informed social media messages, with the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and Minister of Innovation all implicating Israel in killing hundreds by bombing a Gaza hospital, when in fact the explosion was caused by a misfired terrorist rocket that didn’t hit the hospital.

It is shameful that none of these three senior politicians have deleted their posts or issued an online clarification. The closest we had was a late night post by Canada’s National Defense Minister (more than 4 days later), absolving Israel from blame. With nearly 7 million followers, the quick-to-tweet politicians didn’t have to pay for their false messages to go viral. The Prime Minister’s post has been viewed more than 2.6 million times, and it was reposted by more than 5,000 other users. The Foreign Minister’s post was seen more than 2.2 million times. By way of contrast, the Defense Minister has only 41,500 followers, less than 1% of the Prime Minister’s 6.5 million. By the time his post was issued, the damage was done.

So, how do we measure the cost of misinformation, especially when the misinformation is spread by people who are supposed to know better?

I have written about government regulation of online harms a number of times in the past. A few weeks ago, in “Regulating misinformation”, I asked “What should be the role of government in regulating misinformation?”

The article in Fortune indicates TikTok “has had its share of criticism for propagating problematic content. It has faced multiple lawsuits for surfacing suicide, self-harm and disturbing content to kids, leading to mental health consequences.”

The BBC writes that “TikTok and Meta have been formally told to provide the EU with information about the possible spread of disinformation on their platforms relating to the Israel-Gaza conflict.” Under the terms of the EU’s Digital Services Act, companies must respond by set deadlines.

Recently, the Government of Canada announced that it plans to move forward with a bill addressing “online hate speech and other internet-related harms.” The Government of Canada’s website on Online Safety says “Now, more than ever, online services must be held responsible for addressing harmful content on their platforms and creating a safe online space that protects all Canadians.”

How will the legislation deal with the possibility that the online harms originate with the government itself?