Search Results for: harms

What happens if you ask a powerful Artificial Intelligence engine (ChatGPT) to “prepare 1000-2000 words on the most important issues facing Canadian telecom policy”?

Telecommunications policy in Canada is a complex and ever-evolving field, with a variety of important issues facing the industry and government regulators. Some of the most significant issues include:

1. Network expansion and infrastructure development: Canada’s telecommunications infrastructure is facing increasing pressure to keep up with the growing demand for data and internet services. This includes expanding high-speed broadband access to rural and remote areas, as well as upgrading existing networks to support the latest technologies and services.
2. Competition and market structure: The Canadian telecommunications market is dominated by a small number of large companies, which has led to concerns about lack of competition and high prices for consumers. Regulators are working to promote competition and increase choice for consumers through measures such as spectrum auctions and wholesale access rules.
3. Net neutrality: Net neutrality is the principle that all internet traffic should be treated equally, without discrimination or preference given to certain types of traffic or services. Canada has recently implemented net neutrality rules, but the issue is still a contentious one, with some arguing that it stifles innovation and harms competition.
4. Privacy and security: As telecommunications networks become increasingly integrated into our daily lives, there are growing concerns about the security and privacy of personal data. The government has implemented new regulations to protect personal information and ensure that companies are transparent about their data collection and usage practices.
5. Spectrum management: Spectrum is a finite resource that is essential for the operation of telecommunications services. The government manages the allocation of spectrum through auctions and licensing, but there are ongoing debates about how to best allocate and use this valuable resource to support innovation and competition in the telecommunications industry.
6. Interconnection and roaming: Interconnection refers to the ability of different telecommunications networks to connect and exchange traffic, while roaming refers to the ability of mobile devices to connect to other networks when outside of their home network area. These issues are important for ensuring that consumers can access services and connect with others, regardless of their location or the network they are using.
7. 5G: 5G is the next generation of mobile networks that promises faster download and upload speeds, lower latency, and increased capacity for more devices. It’s also expected to enable new technologies like Internet of Things (IoT) and self-driving cars. This is an important issue for Canada’s telecommunication policy, as it will affect the country’s competitiveness in the global economy.
8. Affordable access: Affordable access to the internet and telephone services is a major issue in Canada, particularly in rural and remote areas. The government is working to increase affordability through programs such as the Universal Broadband Fund, which aims to expand high-speed internet access to underserved areas.
9. Telecommunications innovation: The telecommunications industry is constantly evolving, with new technologies and services being developed all the time. Regulators are faced with the challenge of fostering innovation while also ensuring that the industry remains stable and competitive.
10. International trade: Canada’s telecommunications industry is closely tied to the global economy, and the country is heavily involved in international trade agreements and negotiations. This includes issues such as cross-border data flows and market access for Canadian companies in other countries.

The above-mentioned issues are just a few of the key challenges facing Canadian telecommunications policy today. It is important for government regulators and industry stakeholders to work together to find solutions that promote innovation, competition, and consumer choice while also protecting privacy, security, and affordability.

In an undergrad telecom course, I’d score it as a B-plus. It succeeded in canvassing issues overall, but it is incomplete in the discussion portion of many items, partly due to my imposition of a limited word count. The system got item 8 wrong, conflating the issue of “Affordable access” with government programs to assist investment in infrastructure expansion (which is better covered in item 1). However, given that some academics have supported development of large urban government overbuilds (such as ConnectTO) with a goal of creating affordable access, it isn’t a complete surprise that the AI database has been polluted with some misinformation.

I have seen worse papers published by academics and parliamentarians.

There is still a need to fact-check the output of these artificial intelligence systems, just as there is a need to verify human outputs.

That’s good news. ChatGPT isn’t able to replace me… yet.

As a kid, I never really liked the last week of August. The end of August meant the end of summer vacation, long drives back from family visits to the East Coast, teary goodbyes.

The start of school seemed to always include an assignment to write down what we did on our summer vacations.

Well, here we are.

It’s the last week before Labour Day. I have a lot to write about for that first school assignment.

Despite the crazy mess at Toronto’s airport, I managed to have extended visits with my kids and grandkids from far and farther, and that certainly tops my list of accomplishments. Despite the frequent video chats between live visits, there really is nothing like sitting together quietly on a dock fishing, or spoiling the little ones with visits to the bakery for rainbow bagels, or excursions by boat for ice cream.

Everything else this summer takes a distant back seat to the joy of quality in-person time together after a 3 year absence.

Still, I got an awful lot done, most of which found its way into earlier blog posts and some has been amplified in the general press.

There are various calls for an inquiry into the Anti-Racism Action Program and how it came to fund an organization so intertwined with a consultant with a pattern of “antisemitic comments” characterized as “reprehensible and vile.”

There are longer term issues to be explored that are related to this incident. As I indicated last week, The CRTC and its Broadcast Participation Fund shovelled more than half a million dollars to CMAC over the past 6 years. We have not yet seen the 2022 report to learn what was claimed and awarded in the past 12 months.

The CRTC might want to revisit the appropriateness of not allowing public comment on some of its cost awards, comment that may have challenged the appropriateness of the CRTC’s generous $225 per hour funding. It seems certain that the CRTC and the Broadcast Participation Fund will need to take a closer look at the public interest groups who are recipients of cost awards to ensure Canadians are comfortable with how public money is being distributed.

But in my view, the biggest impact will be the complete loss of credibility for Canadian Heritage to attempt to introduce regulation of online harms. A Liberal Member of Parliament made Ministers in the department aware of the potentially embarrassing contract last month – in mid-July. Nothing was done for more than a month about what the Minister now calls “antisemitic and xenophobic statements”. A department that couldn’t react in a timely way to “reprehensible and vile” statements made on a single platform (Twitter) by one of their own paid consultants has little credibility to introduce legislation seeking regulatory oversight of all online content in Canada.

Just a few weeks before the Minister was quoted in a press release with him, Laith Marouf tweeted, “Nothing is more harmful to any decolonisation movements [sic] in the world, especially Palestine, than Jewish White Boys/Girls. In my opinion, allowing them any space in our struggle is dependent on their complete abandonment of personal opinion & only parroting Palestinian voices.”

If only the Minister’s communications staff had access to a Google search bar.

The online harms bill is effectively dead. But, don’t blame Laith Marouf. This key piece of the Liberal Government’s digital plan was a victim of indifference and inaction in the department responsible for the impugned Anti-Racism Action Program.

Last week, Rex Murphy wrote:

No one could use the language, express the contempt and rage on Twitter about any other so-called “marginalized” group with even one-tenth of the ferocity that Marouf used in reference to “Zionists,” as he did for years, with reference to Jews and Israel, and not be called out, shamed and, yes, cancelled.

My point: Slander, insults and actual hate against Jews gets a pass — until some truly extreme example calls attention to it. Try referencing any “marginalized” group as “bags of feces” and see how long any journalist, politician or ordinary citizen would last.

A year ago, an antisemitic outburst from a university professor was allowed to slide with barely a wrist slap. The school likely didn’t want to have the incident impact a multi-million dollar grant announced a few weeks later.

In my part of Ontario, overall it was a great summer. The long range forecast is suggesting that it should be starting to get uncomfortable for some early this fall.

And, that is what I did for my summer vacation. What did you do?

From the outset, I have had concerns about plans to create new legislation addressing online hate.

Some may find my position surprising, given my involvement in the first CRTC application to request blocking of a website, back in August 2006.

That was a very different case from trying to establish a regime that attempts to define what constitutes online harms and enforces limits on our freedom of expression.

As I wrote last year:

we need to be able to distinguish between language that is insightful and words that are inciteful. Which words lead to constructive engagement and which words are those that are destructive? What facts are being omitted because they inconveniently don’t fit the narrative being set forward? Which authors are consistently reliable and which ones seem to prefer sensationalism over substance?

In 1964, ruling on a case considering “hard-core pornography”, US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wrote of the term that “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it”.

How will we define what material online should be considered illegal, versus that material which is merely offensive? Will we know it when we see it?

This could be the challenge for the Heritage Minister in introducing online harms legislation. Indeed, the expert advisory group appointed by Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez earlier this year concluded its work 2 months ago, recognizing “The issue of harmful content found online is both a critical and complex issue that calls for an approach that balances freedom of expression, protection of privacy, and online safety.”

That said, let’s examine a very current situation: a Montreal-based consultant who refers to Jews as “loud mouthed bags of human feces”, and threatens “Jews with a bullet to the head” (as highlighted in a Twitter stream last Friday by journalist Jonathan Kay).

Hateful or merely offensive? To me, it’s pretty clear that this kind of commentary crossed the line.

But we don’t actually need to consider whether or not Laith Marouf’s comments would survive Canadian Heritage’s prospective Online Harms legislation. Legal or not, it seems pretty inexcusable that this same department of the Canadian government has been providing funding to him.

And to add insult, the funding falls under the Department’s “Anti-Racism Action Program”. Was there any due diligence performed by those responsible for vetting applications? Did anyone use Google before handing out cash to this guy?

I highlighted this problem back in April shortly after the news was released, quoting Canada’s Minister of Housing and Diversity and Inclusion. Before providing a Ministerial statement for the CMAC press release, did anyone check references for the other guy being quoted?

Four months after I started asking questions, I have still seen no action by the government to distance itself from this online purveyor of antisemitism.

The Minister has said Canada is seeking to create “a legislative and regulatory framework to … help create a safe space online that protects all Canadians”.

How can we expect the Minister of Canadian Heritage to establish legislation creating safe spaces online, when the same department is funding those creating the kinds of material against which the legislation is intended to target.

There can be no credibility for online harms legislation being proposed by a department that funds those who generate online hate.

The FCC is taking steps to try to block telecom arbitrage schemes, announcing plans to change the inter-carrier compensation rules.

By way of background, the FCC notes

The access charge regime was originally designed to compensate carriers for the use of their networks by other carriers. It also helped ensure that people living in rural areas had access to affordable telephone service through a system of implicit subsidies.
…
Arbitrage schemes take advantage of relatively high access charges, particularly for the remaining terminating tandem switching and transport services that have not yet transitioned to bill-and-keep.

In 2019, the FCC adopted an Access Arbitrage Order, revising its Access Stimulation Rules to prohibit local exchange carriers (LECs) from charging interexchange carriers (IXCs) for services used to deliver calls to access-stimulating LECs. “The revised rules sought to end the ability of LECs to engage in arbitrage of the intercarrier compensation system by extracting artificially inflated tandem switching and transport charges from IXCs to subsidize “free” high volume calling services.”

The FCC found “This sort of arbitrage harms consumers, who ultimately bear the costs for these services, whether or not they use them.”

Since then, the FCC learned about new ways that some carriers are using to continue leveraging arbitrage “schemes.” I would call them scams.

The announcement last Friday was to introduce new rules to try to close these loopholes in the access rate regime.

In a separate notice, the FCC proposed a $116M fine [pdf, 157KB] against a company that the Commission says has been engaging in local rate arbitrage, with nearly 10 million robocalls to generate toll-free compensation.

With IP telephony, traffic can readily be generated anywhere in the world and target distortions in access fees in any country or any region.As the US closes arbitrage opportunities for companies engaged in pumping traffic to generate fraudulent telecom access fees, will such schemes move to other jurisdictions?

Has the CRTC acted adequately to protect Canadian networks and Canadian consumers from the impact of artificial traffic stimulation from foreign and domestic actors?

Do we understand the magnitude of the issue? Does the CRTC have sufficient tools to detect and prevent traffic pumping?

Is more proactive regulatory action and enforcement required?

Last week’s CRTC decision on botnet-blocking can be viewed as a step toward Canada asserting sovereignty over our piece of the internet, but it also raises questions of duplicated efforts by ISED and the Commission.

In Compliance and Enforcement and Telecom Decision CRTC 2022-170: Development of a network-level blocking framework to limit botnet traffic and strengthen Canadians’ online safety, the Commission determined “regulatory action is necessary to ensure that Canadian carriers that block botnets do so in a way that provides a baseline level of protection to Canadians.”

Last week’s decision establishes guiding principles for a future “network-level botnet-blocking framework” and sets in motion activities for the industry-wide CRTC Interconnection Steering Committee (CISC) to assist in developing technical parameters consistent with these principles within nine months. As an aside, don’t you love nested acronyms like CISC? When we created the technical and operational liaison committees 30 years ago, the first C stood for Canadian.

There had been disagreement over the need for regulatory involvement in addressing botnet traffic; the major ISPs, responsible for 80-90% of consumer connections in Canada, argued in favour of the flexibility enabled through existing channels of collaboration is more adaptable than regulation. The major ISPs are already sharing botnet and malware indicators through the Canadian Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (CSTAC), under the auspices of ISED. It is noteworthy that “CSTAC” appears 23 times in the Decision.

Is cyber-security another area (like spectrum management) that requires an organizational realignment between the CRTC and ISED in order to rationalize responsibilities, avoid duplication of efforts, and regulatory overlap?

I have been writing about internet blocking for more than 15 years, in the context of the sovereignty of Canada in protecting its own citizens.

A year and a half ago, the CRTC launched this proceeding, “strengthen Canadians’ online safety.” The Commission concluded that botnet traffic “constitutes a significant issue for cyber security, both in terms of volume and severity of harm.” No surprise there. What is the right way to address the issue?

I question the basis for the type of regulatory intervention being prescribed, which the CRTC claims necessary because:

• Service providers’ current practices are diverse and opaque and lack a practical and consistent mechanism for sharing botnet IOCs;
• Service providers have a considerable role to play in botnet blocking, consistent with a defence-in-depth strategy toward cyber security;
• network-level blocking programs are effective and appropriate; and
• there is confusion among the parties regarding the regulatory basis for the existing botnet blocking conducted by service providers.

Is it notable that a network-level blocking framework may be required as part of Online Harms legislation? To what extent was this influential in the CRTC’s decision?

Some parties suggested the framework should permit consumers to choose whether or not to opt-in to network-level blocking. The CRTC said “CIRA Canadian Shield is used by just 1% of households. This very low figure suggests that opt-in models result in underuse.” I’m not convinced the CRTC’s made accurate use of that statistic. There is a big difference between opting in to protection endorsed by your service provider and having the technical competency to change DNS settings on every device in your home, let alone choosing CIRA’s DNS service. There are competing cyber-security services that offer protections, including protections from the major ISPs themselves.

I am concerned that the centralized model chosen by the CRTC may raise the level of protection afforded to customers of some smaller service providers but could lead to a degradation in responsiveness and security for the majority of Canadians who are served by companies already collaborating.

Security is a competitive service feature offered by service providers and third party firms. As CISC works through the dozen questions asked by the CRTC, it needs to ensure that customers aren’t ultimately losing choices in how their connectivity is safeguarded.

We’ll be hearing back from CISC in 9 months.