Columns

Police telephone by Marcin Wichary (CC BY 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/4nidee

Why the New Canadian Telecom Transparency Rules Fall Short

Canadians have become increasingly troubled by reports revealing that telecom and Internet companies receive millions of requests for subscriber data from a wide range of government departments. In light of public concern, some Internet and telecom companies have begun to issue regular transparency reports that feature aggregate data on the number of requests they receive and the disclosures they make.

The transparency reports from companies such as Rogers, Telus, and TekSavvy have helped shed light on government demands for information and on corporate disclosure practices. However, they also paint an incomplete picture since companies have offered up inconsistent data and some of the largest, including Bell, have thus far refused to come clean on past requests and disclosures.

July 7, 2015 — 10 comments — Columns

Gambling Man by Adrian Sampson (CC BY 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/2yjQp

Quebec’s Website Blocking Plan Gambles With the Open Internet

For governments accustomed to wielding their power to regulate local activity, the Internet has long been a source of frustration. From music sites to Uber to AirBNB, online services represent an enormous challenge to conventional government regulation, which typically relies on a jurisdictional hook to compel compliance.

While most reputable global companies can ill-afford to simply ignore laws or court orders, there are still websites that operate largely beyond the reach of government regulation. In response, some governments have attempted to regulate online behaviour, ordering Internet providers to block access to offending websites.

My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes that Canadians have generally been spared website blocking initiatives due in part to the Telecommunications Act, which prohibits carriers from controlling “the content or influence the meaning or purpose of telecommunications carried by it for the public.” That rule means that Internet providers are effectively prohibited from unilaterally blocking content.

June 30, 2015 — 10 comments — Columns

MTV logos 1981-82 by Fred Seibert (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/aCbLyG

Getting OMNI’d: Why Many Canadian TV Channels May Be Headed for the Chopping Block

Rogers Media’s recent decision to slash 110 jobs and end all newscasts at OMNI, its multicultural channel, has sparked outrage among many ethnic communities, who have lamented the cancellation of local news programs in Italian, Punjabi, Cantonese, and Mandarin. Supporters argue that OMNI programming is essential to those communities and worry that the cancellations will mean that viewers become less politically engaged.

Last week, a House of Commons committee held a hearing on the OMNI cuts as members of Parliament from each party took Rogers executives to task. Rogers was unsurprisingly unapologetic, noting that the decision was based on simple economics as it pointed to declining advertising revenues that made the programming unsustainable.

June 25, 2015 — 12 comments — Columns

38-365 Fingerprint by Bram Cymet (CC BY-NC 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/69jvLD

How the Budget Bill Quietly Reshapes Canadian Privacy Law

A budget implementation bill is an unlikely – and many would say inappropriate – place to make major changes to Canadian privacy law. Yet Bill C-59, the government’s 158-page bill that is set to sweep through the House of Commons, does just that.

The omnibus budget bill touches on a wide range of issues, including copyright term extension and retroactive reforms to access to information laws. But there are also privacy amendments that have received little attention. In fact, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada was not even granted the opportunity to appear before the committee that “studied” the bill, meaning that privacy was not discussed nor analyzed (the committee devoted only two sessions to external witnesses for study, meaning most issues were glossed over).

My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes that the bill raises at least three privacy-related concerns. First, the retroactive reforms to access to information, which are designed to backdate the application of privacy and access to information laws to data from the long-gun registry, has implications for the privacy rights of Canadians whose data is still contained in the registry. By backdating the law, the government is effectively removing the privacy protections associated with that information.

June 15, 2015 — 6 comments — Columns

Day 200 - Why am I still working? by TiggerT (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/8pxqTY

Sorry Bell, Accessing U.S. Netflix is Not Theft

Bell Media president Mary Ann Turcke sparked an uproar last week when she told a telecom conference that Canadians who use virtual private networks (VPNs) to access the U.S. version of Netflix are stealing. Turcke is not the first Canadian broadcast executive to raise the issue – her predecessor Kevin Crull and Rogers executive David Purdy expressed similar frustration with VPN use earlier this year – but her characterization of paying customers as thieves was bound to garner attention.

My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) argues that Turcke’s comments provide evidence of the mounting frustration among Canadian broadcasters over Netflix’s remarkable popularity in Canada. Netflix launched in Canada less than five years ago, yet reports indicate that it now counts 40 per cent of English-speaking Canadians as subscribers. By contrast, Bell started its Mobile TV service within weeks of the Netflix launch, but today has less than half the number of subscribers.

June 8, 2015 — 54 comments — Columns