Search Results for: harms

Last week, MediaSmarts released “From Access to Engagement: Building a Digital Media Literacy Strategy for Canada” [pdf, 2.9MB].

The report is an output from a symposium held in February. MediaSmarts has been advocating for digital literacy for more than 15 years, since its earlier incarnation as the Media Awareness Network, and you will see references to digital literacy on this blog dating back almost as long.

A national strategy will provide experts, advocates and service providers in the digital media literacy field with a unified but flexible approach for preventing and responding to online harms through education and critical skills development. At the same time, people living in Canada will be empowered to use, understand, create and engage with digital technology and digital media, which is at the heart of active digital citizenship and innovation.

Unfortunately, Canada doesn’t have an accurate baseline to measure our digital media literacy skills, unlike some of our closest trading partners, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, or Australia. As I recently noted, digital literacy appears to be a significant inhibitor in increasing adoption of internet connectivity among vulnerable populations eligible for affordable broadband and devices. The report notes “that when it comes to digital participation, access to technology and training is crucial for historically marginalized people in Canada, including Indigenous communities, people living in poverty, newcomers and people with disabilities.”

A recent article in Policy Options by the report’s authors observed “Access alone cannot close the digital divide.”

Digital literacy is more than technological know-how. It includes various ethical, social and reflective practices essential to developing online resilience and ethical digital citizenship. We must then embed these practices in our work, learning and daily life. Approaches to digital literacy that overemphasize access, hard technological skills and risk-avoidance constrain rather than bolster user agency. The risk is that while most people do not need coaxing to use digital technology, many users become deeply immersed in online life without the necessary digital literacy skills and supports.

Let’s take a look at that last sentence. I would agree that “most people do not need coaxing to use digital technology”, but we also need to consider the challenge of digital literacy training for those who do need coaxing. While the number of folks who don’t use internet is closing, last week’s release from Statistics Canada [Full Report: pdf, 820KB] shows there is still over-representation of some groups that are getting left behind. Statistics Canada data identifies age and education among the most significant factors impacting internet skills.

We are making progress. Statistics Canada reports “Fewer Canadians are on the ‘have not’ side of the digital divide”.

From 2018 to 2020, the shares of Canadians identified as either Non-users or Basic users of the internet and digital technologies declined by almost 5 percentage points, from 23.8% to 18.9%. This represented a shift of almost 1.4 million Canadians from the ‘have-not’ to the ‘have’ side of the digital divide.

Leaders of the various low-income broadband programs (Connecting Families, Connected for Success, Internet for Good) may be able to provide valuable input to help inform the development of Canada’s national digital literacy strategy on factors influencing non-adoption of internet connectivity. As I wrote last year, “we have learned that getting people online isn’t just a matter of price.”

Of those who do not currently use the internet, a significant portion attribute their lack of online activity to issues of digital literacy and concern for cybersecurity.

Access alone cannot close the digital divide.

Canada needs to place greater emphasis on development of digital literacy among users and non-users alike.

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.

As Canada prepares to examine another piece of legislation to control “online harms”, will the importance of diverse views be debated by parliamentarians?

A year ago, following the attack on the US Capitol by Trump loyalists, I wrote “Escaping the echo chamber”, expressing a concern that algorithmic news feeds can be depriving too many people of opposing viewpoints. As a result, readers are often presented with a limited range of perspectives, which are frequently left unchallenged, enabling single sided (and perhaps, false) narratives to be amplified within a social network community. This is not just a US phenomenon; we see that in the so-called Truckers Convoy on Parliament Hill, and frankly, we also see it among many responding to the protest.

There are less confrontational examples as well.

On Twitter last week, I noticed a small group of people who apparently couldn’t get past the Bell branding associated with Bell Let’s Talk Day. It was one thing for them to be unwilling to attach a #BellLetsTalk hashtag on their tweets. They went out of their way to criticize the initiative, criticize Bell, or use the occasion to complain about incumbent wireless gross margins in general. In one case, we were told “For the past few years, there has been a steady rise in the backlash to Bell’s annual “talk” day, but this is the first year where I’m seeing a clear gap: Universal opposition and criticism from everybody except institutional/gov accounts and public personalities.”

Of course, this statement doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

A “universal opposition” would be mathematically inconsistent with the year-over-year growth measured in interactions every year since the event began, including 2022 setting records once again. I read “Universal opposition and criticism from everybody” like a Yogi Berra-ism: “Nobody goes to that restaurant anymore because it’s too crowded.” Besides filing that criticism as one that didn’t age well, I suggested that the tweet demonstrates that the author may not be exposed to enough diverse viewpoints.

A few years ago, I wrote “Is social media better at breaking than making?”, that included some key points distilled from an interview with an activist credited with helping trigger the Tahrir Square demonstrations in Cairo, leading to the fall of the Mubarek government. Among other points, he observed:

We tend to only communicate with people that we agree with, and thanks to social media, we can mute, un-follow and block everybody else…online discussions quickly descend into angry mobs… It’s as if we forget that the people behind screens are actually real people and not just avatars… Because of the speed and brevity of social media, we are forced to jump to conclusions and write sharp opinions in 140 characters about complex world affairs. And once we do that, it lives forever on the Internet… today, our social media experiences are designed in a way that favors broadcasting over engagements, posts over discussions, shallow comments over deep conversations… It’s as if we agreed that we are here to talk at each other instead of talking with each other.

I have mentioned before that I subscribe to the Toronto Star despite my frequent disagreement with its editorial stance. I make a point of reading the opinion pages and columnists precisely because I disagree with so many of them. I read a number of other papers online with a wide range of political leanings.

As I wrote last year, “When reading, 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?”

That requires digital literacy training. Remarkably, too many appear to be lacking this basic understanding of a need to diversify our sources of information and cast a wider social net.

Parliament will be debating legislation that could limit speech that offends the sensibilities of some people. That is worrisome to me. In a 2019 post (“Regulating speech”) I commented on the need to be able to distinguish between content that is merely offensive, without being illegal. Earlier that year (in “Dealing with illegal content”), I wrote that “we need to consider the very high bar that has rightly been set in defining what forms of speech are illegal, as contrasted with speech that someone merely deems to be offensive.”

Just over 15 years ago, I was involved with a case involving an internet-based cross-border death threat. Ultimately, the case was resolved by a Virginia court that decided there were bounds on free speech, even by US standards.

I tend to subscribe to the view expressed in the film The American President: “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.”

As I have asked before, 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”?

How do we protect our right to spirited speech, expressing diverse viewpoints, as we continue to promote healthy debate on issues, even when those views might offend the sensitive sensibilities of some?

Today’s post takes a look at extending broadband to unserved areas, stimulated by a recent newspaper article and a New York state news release.

In Saturday’s Toronto Star, I read what I considered to be a superficially researched article about SpaceX Starlink broadband service: “‘Crazy good’: Rural Canadians are raving over Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite-based internet service. Should Canada’s big telcos be worried?”

The bottom line, as stated by SpaceX founder Elon Musk in the final paragraph, is “I want to be clear, it’s not like Starlink is some huge threat to telcos. I think it will be actually helpful and take a significant load off the traditional telcos”.

Unfortunately, you have to read through a full page and a half of muddled messages before reaching the answer to the question posed in the article’s headline.

Should Canada’s big telcos be worried? No, they shouldn’t. The end. Of course, that would have been too short an article to merit the front page of the Saturday business section.

Unfortunately, we were left without any explanation of Musk’s comment about how services like Starlink “will be actually helpful and take a significant load off the traditional telcos.”

The article featured a graphic indicating Canada’s average monthly price for broadband in 2020 ($77) was higher than other surveyed countries other than Australia ($78). The Star didn’t mention that the Australian government has squandered tens of billions of tax dollars on its National Broadband Network and yet, Australians still pay higher prices. The article, that reads somewhat like a Starlink advertorial piece, carries testimonials from customers seemingly happy to pay $700 up front and $130 per month for Starlink service – nearly double Canada’s average broadband price. At those prices, Starlink is clearly not a solution within the affordable reach for many Canadians.

Still, Starlink, and other low earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband systems (unmentioned in the article), are important additions to the array of technologies available to bridge the rural and remote digital divide. LEO has the ability to provide service to locations that are beyond the economic reach of terrestrial wireless (both fixed and mobile), and can provide a more viable solution than wireline technologies in many low density locations.

It demonstrates why governments need to be technology agnostic when looking to accelerate broadband adoption in unserved areas. For example, I think it is a mistake for Ontario’s most recent broadband program to specify technologies for each service area, which may limit the ability for proponents to offer more cost-effective, and perhaps more rapidly deployed service options.

Rather than causing worry among major carriers, Starlink is much more likely to pose a threat to smaller rural wireless internet service providers, especially those providing lower bit-rate services, such as 5Mbps and lower. Further, each lost customer harms the financial viability for these small ISPs to upgrade their facilities. Business cases for providing service in rural and remote areas can be very fragile, and the loss of major clients can be devastating, as I wrote last year in “Anchor institutions”.

Last week, I noticed an interesting press release from New York Governor Kathy Hochul announcing a new billion dollar ‘ConnectAll’ initiative intending to bring affordable broadband to millions of NY residents.

The initiative calls for “over $1 billion in public and private investments to connect New Yorkers in rural and urban areas statewide to broadband”, but that part of the announcement appears to be more sizzle than steak, given a reliance on private sector funding “plus hundreds of millions of forthcoming dollars from the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act”.

Still, there are a few aspects to the announcement that are worth consideration by other jurisdictions, including all levels of government in Canada:

• $30-a-month Affordability Subsidy: To further the expansion of affordable broadband, the Department of Public Service will administer efforts to ensure every eligible New Yorker can take advantage of the IIJA’s $14 billion Affordability Program to support a permanent $30-a-month broadband subsidy for low-income households. The Department will also conduct a statewide marketing program geared toward increasing enrollment in this program — which currently lags below 30 percent of eligible households in New York.

…

• Removing Fees, Outdated Regulatory Hurdles and Leveraging State Assets. This includes a set of reforms not limited to:
  • A Build-Free Initiative for Rural Broadband Deployment – Eliminate state use and occupancy fees that hinder rural broadband deployment directing the Department of Transportation to exempt ConnectALL projects, reducing costs for program participants.
  • Streamline Make-Ready Processes: Direct the Department of Public Service (DPS) to streamline the current make-ready process.
  • Standardize Right-of-Way Access for Cellular and Fiber Deployments and Establish Clear Timelines: Establish clear permitting timelines for cellular and fiber deployments on state land and rights-of-way with simple and standardized forms and processes.
  • Leverage Existing State Fiber Assets: Conduct a pilot to leverage existing State fiber assets to support middle-mile broadband.

In August, I asked “Is there a better approach to affordable telecom service?” Right now, affordable internet programs in Canada are fully funded by the private sector. Would a different model be even more effective?

In addition, we need to examine government fees, and regulatory hurdles are inhibiting deployment of digital infrastructure in rural and remote areas. New York’s ConnectALL initiative has some promising proposals that should be considered by all public agencies and departments in municipal, provincial and federal governments.

Are there public sector assets that be leveraged for faster and more cost effective construction of communications facilities?

Should we rethink the CRTC’s broadband fund, perhaps examining a model that subsidizes service in high cost areas? Rather than subsidizing the upfront capital expenditures for extending networks to unserved areas (like every other government broadband program), should the CRTC fund assist with the ongoing higher operating expense?

The price of service from Starlink (and other satellite providers) are beyond the reach of many households, but such services may be the most economic way to service many Canadian households. Over the past couple years, we have frequently seen broadband funding announcements exceeding $10,000 in subsidies per household (as can be determined by reviewing ISED’s summary funding chart).

Can we be more creative in finding ways to build broadband better?

The following opinion piece appeared on Friday on National Newswatch.

Interestingly, a paper in Telecom Policy by Mark Jamison and Peter Wang of the University of Florida came to my attention on Friday. The study found that there was a five-fold increase in consumers valuation of digital services during the coronavirus outbreak. This struck me as relevant to my opinion piece, below.

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I was struck by a recent editorial in the Globe and Mail (“Two years ago, Ottawa aimed to lower the high price of wireless and internet. Not any more”). It seemed to get many of the background facts right, but somehow didn’t follow its own logic to reach its conclusion.

Let’s look at their own words:

In the span of just two years, Ottawa has completely reversed its thinking – from worrying about the impact of high prices on Canadians, to worrying about the impact that lower prices would have on big telco capital spending.

Gee. What could have happened in the past two years that might have led policy makers to rethink their priorities? What changed?

Let’s see if the Globe and Mail has the answer:

Capital investment in the latest and best networks is necessary. The pandemic made clear a good internet connection is vital to the modern economy.

It is also true that while 99 per cent of urban households are reached by a pipe carrying fast and unlimited internet, that’s only true of 46 per cent of rural households, according to the CRTC. The latter figure is rising but is still too low.

Prices came down, meeting the government’s targets and prices are still falling. But that pandemic accentuated the fact that too few households in rural Canada have access to fast unlimited internet. And government broadband funds just aren’t moving the needle fast enough as I recently remarked. The Rapid Response Stream simply isn’t rapid enough.

The need for capital investment in networks became more evident, for expanding service to unserved areas, as well as enhancing service in all areas.

As the Globe itself recognized, “a careful balance is necessary, when it comes to the wholesale rates charged to upstarts for network access.”

Increased investment from facilities-based carriers, and that includes major companies and smaller regional and local companies, means expanded coverage for rural Canadians, reducing the need for government subsidies for broadband builds and accelerating service delivery.

Are there still affordability challenges for some Canadians? Absolutely. There are many factors inhibiting broadband adoption in low-income households. But those problems don’t get solved by arbitrarily lowering prices. Studies have shown “the price of broadband service is not the primary factor that keeps many low-income households from subscribing.”

Lower wholesale rates won’t lead to increased adoption of broadband services among low income households, but such regulatory rate action clearly harms the business case for carriers to expand their service areas.

So, let’s recap. The Globe editorial noted that “In the span of just two years, Ottawa has completely reversed its thinking.”

What happened in the past two years?

The pandemic helped all of us gain a greater appreciation for the necessity of broadband and the urgency for increasing capital investment in telecommunications infrastructure. Ottawa looked at the facts and, “Acting in the public interest”, recognized the landscape had changed.

The CRTC reviewed its 2019 decision and found that it made material errors that were harming the business case for broadband investment. It needed to correct its error.

As Minister Bains said last August “Canada’s future depends on connectivity”.