Wednesday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your mid-week reading.

- Today's wild guess: the word from Tony Clement's birthday party is in fact a shrewd bit of reputation management, with the hoped result of ensuring that future searches for "'Tony Clement' + 'census' + 'bad joke'" don't turn up the likes of this. We'll find out soon what scenario the Cons' spin-meisters come up with to take the sting out of "wet-lipped halfwit".

- Meanwhile, the war on accurate data continues, as the Macdonald-Laurier Institute echoes another of the Cons' rightly-derided positions in complaining that StatsCan bases its numbers on crimes actually reported rather than making up higher and scarier figures.

[Update: pogge has more.]

- Yes, it's possible for a political party to stand up to the latest in dumb-on-crime policymaking. And for its MPs to offer up useful proposals on the issues Canadians care about most. You just won't tend to hear much about it.

- Finally, Tim Wu nicely sums up why we shouldn't buy the big telecoms' argument about wanting to limit bandwidth use through usage-based billing:

The knowledge that penalties await heavy Internet usage does something quite terrible: discourage desirable behaviour. Most of Bell’s arguments for treating consumers as wrongdoers rely on the villainization of “bandwidth hogs” who use up everyone else’s bandwidth and generally bring misery to the land. But there are better words for big users of the Internet: “pioneers” and “innovators.” A nation that spends its time worrying about bandwidth caps is not a nation that leads.

What’s worse, it’s all quite unnecessary. Different people do use the Internet in different amounts. And there are, in fact, perfectly reasonable ways to deal with variable demand. Operators can offer faster connections for those who want more and offer discount plans for light users. An ongoing bandwidth limit is much preferable to a monthly cap. But Bell has shown interest in none of the reasonable solutions to its so-called congestion problem. Rather, it wants a system of penalties, and wants its wholesalers to be forced to go along with the scheme. Like credit-card companies, it actually wants customers to make mistakes.

[Edit: fixed wording.]