Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted material for your weekend reading.

- Great (and true!) news from the CRTC:

CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein says the commission tried to stall the amendment to its prohibition on false and misleading news for 10 years, but eventually gave into pressure from the Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations when it proposed its amendments in January.

But now that the regulations committee has agreed to no longer pursue the issue, the chair says the CRTC will drop it.

“We never wanted to touch this thing. We put it forward because we were ordered to do it. We did what we thought would be a workable compromise,” von Finckenstein said in brief interview Friday at the Prime Time conference in Ottawa, organized by the Canadian Media Production Association.

“I was perfectly happy with what it was before, and I’m sure at the next commission meeting, we will withdraw this attempt at rewriting.”

- The Globe and Mail takes up the idea of birth bonds in contrast to the Cons' desire to spend billions on prisons. And it's hard to imagine that many Canadians would choose the Cons' side given the choice:

Assuming Canada had extra billions in a time of large deficits, consider the birth bond – a government investment to be made each time a child is born. The investment would be held until the child turns, say, 18, and then made available for postsecondary education or an apprenticeship program. Canada has 370,000 births a year. How much could it afford to put into an ambitious investment for each newborn, instead of into jail expansion?
...
If Mr. Page is right, Canada could seed an education account for each newborn with $13,783. Outlandish? Maybe, but it makes more sense than prison expansion, if the government is intent on spending an extra $5-billion. Canada wouldn’t need a birth bond, anyway; net tuition paid by all students is $3.5-billion a year. Instead of Truth in Sentencing, the country could afford Free in University, with change left over.

Let’s assume, for the moment, Mr. Page is wildly out of touch, as Ottawa claims. The federal government’s published budget estimates for federal corrections show an annual hike of $861-million – 36 per cent – by 2012-13 (compared with 2009-10). Now assume, conservatively, that the provincial costs rise by the same amount as a result of the federal crime bills. For that $1.722-billion extra a year, what could Canada do that is forward-looking, and has a long-term economic payoff?

It could pour resources into research. Currently, the government spends about $3-billion on the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Canada could take the $1.08-billion given to the CIHR each year and double it, and still have $700-million to spend on an enormous expansion of subsidies for master’s and PhD students.

- I'm sure we can all agree the general public is too jaded about politics to think that forgery or deception matter. Right? RIGHT?

- But at least some people do still admire Bev Oda. Take for example Tabatha Southey:

Sure, some of us were, and I imagine still are, capable of changing a C to a C+, but very few of us are “courageous” enough to change a C into a “NOT a C.” This is essentially what Ms. Oda did when she (or so she now claims) arranged for a recommendation prepared and signed by the Canadian International Development Agency to be altered to state that CIDA did “NOT” recommend that funding for the church-based foreign-aid organization Kairos be continued, when in fact continuing funding is exactly what CIDA did recommend.

This wasn't a matter of changing $7-million to $3.7-million in funding. Any of us could've done that. This was no such small feat. Fraudsters, we've found our saint.

Not only did Ms. Oda give a false impression regarding what CIDA had recommended, she oversaw the alteration of a document already signed by two signatories and possibly herself so that it would support her claim, if and when the document were ever to be examined by complete and utter morons.

On responsibilities

Iain Marlow comes close to the point when it comes to usage based billing. But let's push forward to a full recognition of what we should expect when the CRTC sets its policies:

Lawrence Surtees, the lead telecom analyst at research firm IDC Canada, points out that the cost to transport each byte is constantly falling – especially on fibre cables, buried in bundles of multiple strands. Of the CRTC’s average monthly download rate, which companies argue could strain their networks, Mr. Surtees says, “That’s nothing; one fibre strand can carry more than that per second.”

And this is where the question of Internet metering hits a logical brick wall that most people tend to forget. Internet service providers are for-profit, publicly traded companies with responsibilities to their shareholders. CEOs of the country’s phone and cable companies would be fired if they didn’t capitalize on exploding bandwidth usage. Not forcing metered use on their small rivals, something they already do on their own customers, would inevitably hemorrhage customers to their rivals.

Even as Mr. von Finckenstein said he would review their decision, he stood by the idea of a metered Internet. “Usage-based billing is a legitimate principle for pricing Internet services,” he told the MPs. “We are convinced that Internet services are no different than other public utilities.”

But unlike gas and electricity, which are consumed and disappear, the amount of bandwidth being used simply swells and contracts in the carriers’ pipes. The cost to transport a gigabyte can be lower than a penny, though Bell charges between $1.50 to $2.50 for each gigabyte you go over your plan – a fee that varies not by time of day, but whether you are in Ontario or Quebec.

Of course, it's absolutely true that the biggest ISP's responsibility is to try to wring every dollar they can out of their networks, even if it means charging completely disproportionate rates to their customers and third-party providers alike.

But it's equally true - and equally important to remember - that it's the job of the CRTC to regulate those same ISPs in the public interest, rather than prioritizing the freedom of big telecoms to wring every cent they can out of their dominant position. And the current outcry over UBB looks to be providing exactly the type of reminder needed to get our public institutions back to that task.

On public interests

As the possibility circulates that the Cons might turn the CRTC into the Fox News North Development Agency, Steve Anderson offers a useful reminder of what the agency has done right:

(T)he CRTC recognizes its own limitations within a highly contested space, and feels political pressure from the Conservative government, which is very cozy with big media and big telecom companies. These companies also bombard the CRTC with their own arguments and narratives. Commissioners attend their conferences, the firms have a small army of lobbyists, and indeed there is a revolving door between the CRTC and industry that means many decision-makers come from the industry they are supposed to regulate.

But recent rulings suggest that the CRTC can do the right thing when faced with public pressure. It is our job to engage the CRTC, to be a force within the highly contested space of media policy, so as to give them the energy to push back against industry and the Conservative government that often acts on its behalf. If the public is engaged en masse, the CRTC can be transformed into the public institution it is supposed to be.

Of course, the CRTC's independence in other rulings will all too likely make it even more of a target for the Harper government than it might otherwise have been. So while it's indeed important to be heard by the CRTC as it stands now, it's equally so to make sure that the Cons can't make irreversible changes as part of their effort to destroy Canada's public institutions.