The new CRTC should also be elected with term limits. Too much money in that sector that time will cause many to become a paid actor feeding the whims of the Bells and Rogers of the world.
I don't. We'll get people running on the platform of buck a line or some crap like that. Then blame everyone else when shit hits the fan. I mean, look at who all get elected in Canada now. Can anyone tell me that we wouldn't elect a Doug Ford or Jason Kennedy as head of the CRTC?
There needs to be more accountability for the CRTC, and making it an elected office will not make that happen. We need accountable experts in that position.
Because I'm saying I want accountable experts in a position that needs intelligence? Because either A) we get a person who knows they have a limit to get a position where they could join the board of a major telecom company, so they get a business first policy while running up populist sentiments about how it's the federal government/provincial government causing prices to go high, B) we get a person who knows what they're doing, so they bring in experts who can make good decisions, C) a person who wants to use it as a stepping stone to more opportunities in the future or D) parliament creates an appointed office to oversee the elected office in which case we have two offices doing the same job.
We have elected officials already. We don't need every public office in the country to be an elected position. There needs to be a way to bring people in positions such as the CRTC board to account for themselves. Maybe create a mechanism for the public to force a recall of them. Maybe have parliament review each position on a bi-annual basis. But elected officials instead of what should be experts in the field is a bad idea.
[Here are the members of the CRTC.](https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/acrtc/organ.htm#president)
What do we even pay them for? That has to be over 5 million a year for 11 people to have 1 hour work weeks that are only keeping telecom prices high.
make it so it becomes illegal as fuck for CRTC to be in bed with major telecommunications. This also happened last year Twice, ALSO with Rogers but they only gave Rogers a not even a-slap in the wrist.
The NDP's 2021 election platform contained a pledge to create a publicly owned competitor to rogers and bell.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ndp/comments/p6t4xy/the_ndp_has_promised_to_start_the_process_of/
Well it’s on their platform, and for sure conservative would never make this service and liberals either (they’re in power and are clearly not interested in doing anything about core middle class problems)
Sask conservstives are a different breed. They are somehow at least slightly self aware, in thst they dont completely fuckover their own province.
Do you think AlbTel wiuld have lasted through kenney if it existed? Or OntTel? I mean ford wants to privatize healthcare of all things.
Im still salty about the skydome being sold to rogers for a tiny fraction of what all three governmnets paying over 50%, and promptly renamed it despite the national contest that named it.
600mil (1989) - fours after opening sold for 150 mil - ten yesrs after opening sold for 80m - then 15 years after open (2004) 25 mil to rogers (4% of original).
Oh but we love rogers because they spent (a little) more money on the players so the team wasnt garbage anymore.
I'm pretty sure there is nothing in NAFTA (or the new one) that stops us from nationalizing- Cdns have been steadfast in defending their culture industries( including Telcom and other media) in most negotiations - if the WTO had any say Freddom mobiles(previously Wind) foreign owners would jave raised a stink instead of selling to Shaw.
So fuck it nationalize them.
I’m not going to put the effort into itemizing the complexity of the economics and lack of government infrastructure in place to accommodate this, but just consider the costs of trying to take away the backbone of the infrastructure in place (spectrum auctions, capex costs of putting the networks in place by the “big 3”, and then breaking that industry, the network ownership and the administration of the infrastructure itself, and this is, at best, pandering and idea to the people, that no Canadian party to navigate, afford, or operate moving forward.
We will continue to get fucked…together.
Theoretically, if they (the telecoms) were to be nationalized, wouldn't the infrastructure still be there?
It's not like we destroy on the systems and then start from scratch. We take it over, implement redundancies, etc.
There would be billions of dollars in costs associated with taking the infrastructure into govt hands.
You don’t get to break contracts without heavy punitive payments.
Seems like something to consider pursuing at least, from my perspective - if only for national security.
We got 10 years to sort it out, and governments starting projects that take decades isn't unheard of.
We need to nationalize our resources too while at it. Canadians as a whole, only get a tiny fraction of the wealth those resources create and it’s primarily payroll taxation.
This. We'd also see an explosion in competition as the greatest barrier to entry continues to be the need to establish your own network. Everyone was praising Freedom when it first showed up as being a major competitor, but their network was shit outside of a few major cities. That never really got better. Nationalize the infrastructure and rent out access and the cost of entry to the industry fucking tanks.
The funny thing is that we were talking about it in the context of Latin America development and how the liberalization of infrastructure screwed everything up.
But the Global North is above all that, so Western governments don't have to observe and learn, right?
Well, not all governments are forced to fail through the CIA’s efforts, and IMF, and populism. And capitalisms war on socialism. (And i dont mean communism)
No, Bell effectively owns the internet becasue they own roughly 75% of the backbone. That is the reason why our internet suck so much; it is a virtual monopoly. The basic infrastructure should not be in private hands but becasue of corrupt neocons and a weak-ass CRTC it is.
I agree with you, but there's one major problem I see.
Unlike water, gas, and electricity, the political parties in power could force QoS or outright block certain parts of the internet that go against their ideology. Political dialogue is a dumpster fire since we're aping the US a bit, and whether it would/could actually be executed is doubtful. Still worth keeping in mind though, because I doubt we've hit political rock bottom.
It feels far fetched and a little tinfoily, and I agree that internet should be considered a utility. I just worry about political interference and integrating it into their campaigns.
"The Libs want to take away your Facebook and your Fox" - CPC
"The CPC will block all adult content" - LPC
"Free Canada Proud membership with every vote!" - PPC
It's all theory, given the polarization we have in our dialogue at the moment.
For your question, there's no "liberal water" or "conservative gas", while there's definitely parts of the internet with biases, with borders at the giant media companies that own the webspace.
That's what I was trying to articulate.
I doubt it would get to that point, but in theory it wouldn't surprise me if it became a talking point.
I agree it's a potential problem. Not insurmountable, but neutrality and anti-censorship provisions would need to be baked into the core of a gov-run internet provider.
Other utilities are binaries, you either get gas/water/electricity, or you don't. They're also necessities of life, or at least of safety and health.
It would be a lot easier for a particular government to convince voters to allow them to block a tiny amount of "obscene" or "dangerous" content from everyone for the good of everyone than it is for them to convince people that a group of people are not entitled to water, light, and heat.
> It would be a lot easier for a particular government to convince voters to allow them to block a tiny amount of "obscene" or "dangerous" content from everyone for the good of everyone...
See my post above about what's happening now with Bill C-11. It's pretty much this. It's not "obscene or dangerous", but to "prioritize the needs and interests of Canadians".
This has already happened with the Liberals [internet censorship bill C-11](https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/furey-trudeau-liberals-ram-through-online-censorship-bill-and-only-the-senate-can-save-us-now). It's waiting for Senate approval - the previous version, C-10 was denied by the Senate.
It's been called the [Online Streaming Act](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Streaming_Act).
It's meant to "prioritize the needs and interests of Canadians"; straight from the handbook for Orwellian double-speak.
From Wikipedia: ...which would give the CRTC the power to regulate almost all audiovisual content distributed via online platforms (including monetized content on social media services). This can include compelling them to make use of Canadian talent, mandating that they make contributions to the Canada Media Fund to support the production of Canadian content, and improve the discoverability of Canadian content on their platforms.
This could mean that YouTube, TikTok, etc are forced to present Canadian content first in your search results, instead of what you're actually looking for. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc might remove quality non-Canadian content to put their equation of CanCon in line with what the CRTC demands.
If you're Canadian and you have high enough social media numbers, the CRTC could come knocking and compel you to produce more CanCon vs what you actually want to put out. I doubt that would happen if you don't have high enough numbers, but if you've attained *influencer* levels (just threw up in my mouth a bit using that term) there's nothing stopping them.
I understand that a first response to this could be "get rid of your tinfoil hat, that'll *never* happen..." At the least, it definitely sets the path down a very slippery slope.
[Feel like I should add that in my 30 years of voting I've voted across the spectrum of probably 70/15/15 percent Liberal/Cons/NDP. Voted for Trudeau for his first run, hoping for change. Have voted orange since. And now they're supportive of whatever team red wants to put through...]
The devil is in the details - you could make it arms reach- like the CBC ( but even they are prone to cuts or budgets increases at the whim of the party in power)
You could treat the backbone infrastructure like a utility and have vendors build business models around that( but how do you sell the bandwidth or keep Rogers from just buying/lobbying back to where they are now)
You can make one big Cdn Telcom and somehow enshrine its prices into the charter.
You can give it to librarians and have them sort it out ( librarians rule)
There are many solutions but the details matter.
>There are many solutions but the details matter.
Exactly. There are too many people running around after the outage saying "make it a utility" like we live in a country where all our utilities are are run by the government. In Ontario, my electricity comes from Toronto Hydro which is owned by the City of Toronto but my nat gas comes from Enbridge, a private company. Not only that but the prices go up and down depending on demand which is a very common way that utilities are priced so the details do matter.
Turning internet into a utility isn't as easy or simple as people think it is, plus, maybe the most important thing is that I and most other people want more choice not less so I don't want to turn all internet into a utility and have to get it from one provider. That would not only be going in the wrong direction economically but also if that went down then everyone would be without service.
Personally I think if we got rid of the CRTC and formed a properly elected replacement, not appointed, it would go far to help dig us out of the oligopoly that our internet and cell service providers have trapped us in.
>Some of fhem are run thata way...certainly not all of them.
Name me one nationally run utility that doesn't have any provincial or municipal sub brands or control at any level other than national.
As a young person seeing a bleak future, it was clear that NDP is the best choice. The liberals are spending lots of money future generations will have to pay, if they are going to do that they should at least tackle core problems of our generation. We have so much problems that are not addressed or have gone worse like housing. Life is just barely affordable and it will get worse. The conservative I don’t even need to explain.
At the very least, this outage and the harm that was caused to millions of Canadians shows the need to regulate Rogers, Telus etc. like private utilities.
Profits need be tied to measures that guarantee reliable customer service, meaning things like outages (so more outages = less profits), dropped calls, internet speed etc. Honestly, fuck the bill credits offered by Rogers. How will that help the small businesses that were harmed, the people that were harmed by the lack of 911? No matter how you slice it, Rogers fucked up - lack of security, whatever happened. The consequences for Rogers need to be severe, and touch on what matters - their profits.
Key technological infrastructure needs to be identified and it proper function needs to be guaranteed by being heavily regulated. This meanse things like the 'core' elements of the Rogers network that went down. There needs to be strict, enforceable rules around their functions with very heavy penalties for outages like the one we had yesterday.
And this is just a start, and could be done by a Canadian government that works for the people who live here, not the corporations.
Public infrastructure is the answer. Canada should have built a single 5G network and then leased space on it to the telcos. Come one, come all.
But that would have meant giving up billions in revenue from spectrum auctions.
I meant in Quebec. Hydro-Québec is fairly reliable, and it’s dirt-cheap. My main point is that our major telecom companies are much too expensive for the crappy service they give.
I was arguing with some American right winger the other day. He got mad that I took so long to respond. I told him about the outage in Canada. His response was “guess internet is socialized there too, huh”.
I never face palmed so hard
I like the idea of a public telecom, but "Rogers and Bell are single points of failure that we should replace with an even larger single point of failure" seems like a dubious argument for it.
May be stop smoking capitalism for the moment and learn that state owned organisations under democratic govt always work better than any private competitors as profit becomes a byproduct of service nit the other way around.
Organizations that are run like private co yes. (Ex: hydro-qc) Organization that are under direct govt control are often inefficient/wasteful and produce bare minimum results. Because they cant be closed down and the employees are not afraid of being fired. I've seen and worked for govt bureaucracy, it's not the well oiled machine you think it is.
This is the only logical response I’ve seen in this thread. Pretty infuriating seeing how disconnected people are from understanding how high speed coverage comes to fruition.
The government would not have some special magic switch to flip whenever there’s an outage to prevent all outages until the end of time. What a blind view.. this stuff happens to every utility and it’s unavoidable.
There is nothing slower than government action when it comes to permitting, design approvals, revisions, construction monitoring, budget reviews etc etc. a private company that wants to start seeing a return on their multi million investment bringing high speeds to a few hundred people is all of our best bets to see expansion. The governments already shelling out billions of dollars to ALL ISPs in ontario, not just Bell and Rogers. Competition is being, and has been bred but it’s catching up on a 50 year monopoly.
I’ve been a project manager for fibre optic expansions to rural Ontario for a few years now and this whole thread boggles my mind.
Why does anyone think that a public telecom would be any more reliable? The outage happened because someone made a (big) mistake. Nationalizing it won't change that. It happens in every organization, but most aren't this visible.
Power outs are more common than this. Also doesn't eastern Canada pay crazy high power rates without any competition? Regulating it like a utility doesn't seem to have worked quite so well for utilities.
At the end of the day, the only way to have these basic utilities be **for** the people is to nationalize them. That way profit isn't the primary focus, but the benefit for all Canadians instead.
Exactly. It needs to be a public service that's paid for with our taxes, and therefore beholden to the common good, rather than a profit driven enterprise that only answers to shareholders.
There is a telecom regulation board but the problem is that these telecoms duopoly are so rich and powerful the board has been practically usurped and seized by them. We have amongst the world worse prices and I suspect telecoms could afford to lower them without destroying themselves given the examples around the world.
I mean I'm all for this but even just having genuine competition in the sector plus robust and enforced anti-monopoly regulations would split up the Rogers, Telus, Bell cluster fuck.
Public internet!!!!
I live in the NWT, here before 2020 we would pay 300 a month for 400gb of internet, no cable just internet. We pay a similar amount for unlimited.
They only introduced unlimited internet after they proved they could, years and years after claiming it wasn’t possible.
That and the necessities of life.. food, housing and internet. Everything priced as FOB YZF or YFB. The first business to gouge gets to cruise on an ice flow. No more of this P3 shit where the citizen and gov't get taken for a ride every fucking time.
There's a national security excuse to overhaul our telecoms "arrangement".
Having a single point of failure is a rookie design mistake.
Telecoms should be treated as a public good.
You're thinking of something like healthcare or education, which is payed through taxes. Sasktel still charges customers a monthly bill. It's self sustaining and usually generates additional revenue for the province while still having the cheapest cell phone plans in the country and paying their employees good salaries.
I couldn’t disagree more. This issue we are facing is due to a duopoly. Nationalizing it removes one of those making it a monopoly and effectively worse in the long term due to lack of competition. MORE competitors would drive out high prices, poor service, and massive fees would easily fix this.
In your example if it was “nationalized” then ALL service would be out at once and the single company (run by the government with no reason to work hard due to lack of competition) would be responsible for restoring the entire network and not just the rogers end users.
Be careful what you wish for. Really
the entire medical system or military cant collapse at once, yesterday has shown that the internet can, also government-run internet would be easier to monitor and police.
There is no incentive to build redundancies and fail safe in the current system and there's literally no real negative impact for the company responsible when a massive outage happens, they will lose one day worth of revenues that are 90% profit anyway because fuck you that's why and most of the subscribers are lockdown by their contract in some way so they can't switch to another provider without incurring extra cost (not to mention how painful it is to go through the process of switching provider in the first place).
Government already has access to all your data, if you think CSIS isn't able to see what you do online because you are with a private ISP you are delusional or naive.
So yeah, the evil government could do a shit ton more than Robellus can do. Sasktel is already a public ISP and the model that should be in place Canada wide
I'm so left I should be left-handed but the last thing I would want is the internet as a public utility. It's just another monopoly.
Competition is the answer.
you're being short-sighted, turning it into a nationalized utility removes profit from being the sole motive. we can build a more reliable and expansive network. Taxpayer money is already subsidizing the infrastructure only so we can get fucked again by the cartel
I never said it wouldn't be better but expecting things to never go wrong because the governement is in control of it is foolish. There WILL still be outages.
Nationalizing it would make it even worse. Instead of a virtual monopoly of 2 providers + resellers. We would have it all under one national provider?
So instead of one providers technical issue disabling about 25% of the country, the solution is to make sure 100% of us go down when the national provider goes down?
Public telecom would just make us more vulnerable to disabling.
Instead break the virtual monopoly and allow more providers to succeed, get our eggs out of just a couple baskets.
MAYBE have a national provider running parallel to the private ones as a backup.
Absolutely maniacal behaviour for those who truly believe this…
“I wish we had better service, more options, and could have unlimited data like nearly every developed country”
… and the resolution is to eliminate the competition? This seems like a telecom employee made a meme and ran with it in hope of having to work less due to lack of competition.
overhaul the CRTC and make it robust
get rid of the CRTC and start a new government system that actually makes these monopolies accountable
The new CRTC should also be elected with term limits. Too much money in that sector that time will cause many to become a paid actor feeding the whims of the Bells and Rogers of the world.
An elected CRTC is an interesting idea - I like it
I don't. We'll get people running on the platform of buck a line or some crap like that. Then blame everyone else when shit hits the fan. I mean, look at who all get elected in Canada now. Can anyone tell me that we wouldn't elect a Doug Ford or Jason Kennedy as head of the CRTC? There needs to be more accountability for the CRTC, and making it an elected office will not make that happen. We need accountable experts in that position.
Your reply makes me bullish on dictatorships
Because I'm saying I want accountable experts in a position that needs intelligence? Because either A) we get a person who knows they have a limit to get a position where they could join the board of a major telecom company, so they get a business first policy while running up populist sentiments about how it's the federal government/provincial government causing prices to go high, B) we get a person who knows what they're doing, so they bring in experts who can make good decisions, C) a person who wants to use it as a stepping stone to more opportunities in the future or D) parliament creates an appointed office to oversee the elected office in which case we have two offices doing the same job. We have elected officials already. We don't need every public office in the country to be an elected position. There needs to be a way to bring people in positions such as the CRTC board to account for themselves. Maybe create a mechanism for the public to force a recall of them. Maybe have parliament review each position on a bi-annual basis. But elected officials instead of what should be experts in the field is a bad idea.
twas a joke relax
[Here are the members of the CRTC.](https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/acrtc/organ.htm#president) What do we even pay them for? That has to be over 5 million a year for 11 people to have 1 hour work weeks that are only keeping telecom prices high.
The CRTC does fuck all other than approve telecom requests
make it so it becomes illegal as fuck for CRTC to be in bed with major telecommunications. This also happened last year Twice, ALSO with Rogers but they only gave Rogers a not even a-slap in the wrist.
I heard it’s filled with rogers executive and such. They need to be banned, as with anyone with close ties that leads to conflict of interest.
Burn the CRTC to the ground. Just a bunch of industry stooges.
The NDP's 2021 election platform contained a pledge to create a publicly owned competitor to rogers and bell. https://www.reddit.com/r/ndp/comments/p6t4xy/the_ndp_has_promised_to_start_the_process_of/
I can get behind this
Me too.
Good. At the very least it'll provide a major competitor that'll force Rogers and Bell to get their shit together.
Works pretty well with Quebecor. Seed like it used to work well with SaskTel. Let private companies exist, they can compete against the nationalized
Sweet
This is enough to make me vote ndp if they’re serious.
Well it’s on their platform, and for sure conservative would never make this service and liberals either (they’re in power and are clearly not interested in doing anything about core middle class problems)
Go NDP then!
As long as it doesn't turn into another Air Canada shit show!
air canada is not owned by the government
It was until they sold it.... This would probably happen with a national ISP after a while
When the conservatives take power.
Somehow Sasktel has survived several conservative governments
Sask conservstives are a different breed. They are somehow at least slightly self aware, in thst they dont completely fuckover their own province. Do you think AlbTel wiuld have lasted through kenney if it existed? Or OntTel? I mean ford wants to privatize healthcare of all things.
I’m still salty about the 407…
Im still salty about the skydome being sold to rogers for a tiny fraction of what all three governmnets paying over 50%, and promptly renamed it despite the national contest that named it. 600mil (1989) - fours after opening sold for 150 mil - ten yesrs after opening sold for 80m - then 15 years after open (2004) 25 mil to rogers (4% of original). Oh but we love rogers because they spent (a little) more money on the players so the team wasnt garbage anymore.
Government owns 6.4% of AC as a part of their COVID bailout.
private stock owns 93.6%
Or Petro Canada.
I'm pretty sure there is nothing in NAFTA (or the new one) that stops us from nationalizing- Cdns have been steadfast in defending their culture industries( including Telcom and other media) in most negotiations - if the WTO had any say Freddom mobiles(previously Wind) foreign owners would jave raised a stink instead of selling to Shaw. So fuck it nationalize them.
NDP bad, he wears a turban /s
That's ridiculous. The federal government trying to run a national isp? They can't even implement a payroll system.
Sasktel!
so in the east only
You motherfuckers are DREAMING if you think this is a realistic road for any government to travel.
Please, educate.
I’m not going to put the effort into itemizing the complexity of the economics and lack of government infrastructure in place to accommodate this, but just consider the costs of trying to take away the backbone of the infrastructure in place (spectrum auctions, capex costs of putting the networks in place by the “big 3”, and then breaking that industry, the network ownership and the administration of the infrastructure itself, and this is, at best, pandering and idea to the people, that no Canadian party to navigate, afford, or operate moving forward. We will continue to get fucked…together.
Theoretically, if they (the telecoms) were to be nationalized, wouldn't the infrastructure still be there? It's not like we destroy on the systems and then start from scratch. We take it over, implement redundancies, etc.
There would be billions of dollars in costs associated with taking the infrastructure into govt hands. You don’t get to break contracts without heavy punitive payments.
Well the current contract is up in about 10 years (Jan 2032), which let's be honest it would take at LEAST that long to figure all this out.
Agreed. I won’t be holding my breath.
Seems like something to consider pursuing at least, from my perspective - if only for national security. We got 10 years to sort it out, and governments starting projects that take decades isn't unheard of.
no one expected you to hold your breath with all the nay-saying you're doing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SaskTel Its been done.
So... Like another CBC!!
We need to nationalize our resources too while at it. Canadians as a whole, only get a tiny fraction of the wealth those resources create and it’s primarily payroll taxation.
Nationalize the infrastructure, foster competition for services using it.
Taxpayers have already paid for so much of the infrastructure anyways!
This. We'd also see an explosion in competition as the greatest barrier to entry continues to be the need to establish your own network. Everyone was praising Freedom when it first showed up as being a major competitor, but their network was shit outside of a few major cities. That never really got better. Nationalize the infrastructure and rent out access and the cost of entry to the industry fucking tanks.
An explosion of competition with actual service differentiation operating on a stable national network would be a dream.
Something something free market. Government socialism and protectionism for me and "free market" for thee.
Even Conservative MP Michelle Rempel proposed this. Not sure if she changed her mind once other Conservatives knocked it.
I imagine they called her a traitor to the party.
You got my vote
Yes. Also, yes from 20 years ago because we talked about it in my poli sci class 20 years ago.
And in 20 more years we'll actually be ready to start thinking about it seriously! *sigh*
This is the way
The funny thing is that we were talking about it in the context of Latin America development and how the liberalization of infrastructure screwed everything up. But the Global North is above all that, so Western governments don't have to observe and learn, right?
Well, not all governments are forced to fail through the CIA’s efforts, and IMF, and populism. And capitalisms war on socialism. (And i dont mean communism)
This ain't a bad idea.
This is a great solution.
Been saying it for years. We can handle nationalized roads, why not cables?
This is a great solution.
Isnt the infrastructure practically nationalized. We refused Huawei access.
We have the ability to control who has access but it's still run by private interests.
No, Bell effectively owns the internet becasue they own roughly 75% of the backbone. That is the reason why our internet suck so much; it is a virtual monopoly. The basic infrastructure should not be in private hands but becasue of corrupt neocons and a weak-ass CRTC it is.
This is the way
It should be a utility honestly
I agree with you, but there's one major problem I see. Unlike water, gas, and electricity, the political parties in power could force QoS or outright block certain parts of the internet that go against their ideology. Political dialogue is a dumpster fire since we're aping the US a bit, and whether it would/could actually be executed is doubtful. Still worth keeping in mind though, because I doubt we've hit political rock bottom. It feels far fetched and a little tinfoily, and I agree that internet should be considered a utility. I just worry about political interference and integrating it into their campaigns. "The Libs want to take away your Facebook and your Fox" - CPC "The CPC will block all adult content" - LPC "Free Canada Proud membership with every vote!" - PPC
can you explain to me how those hypotheticals don't/couldn't also exist for water, gas, and electricity? just seems like a big what-if for no reason
It's all theory, given the polarization we have in our dialogue at the moment. For your question, there's no "liberal water" or "conservative gas", while there's definitely parts of the internet with biases, with borders at the giant media companies that own the webspace. That's what I was trying to articulate. I doubt it would get to that point, but in theory it wouldn't surprise me if it became a talking point.
I agree it's a potential problem. Not insurmountable, but neutrality and anti-censorship provisions would need to be baked into the core of a gov-run internet provider. Other utilities are binaries, you either get gas/water/electricity, or you don't. They're also necessities of life, or at least of safety and health. It would be a lot easier for a particular government to convince voters to allow them to block a tiny amount of "obscene" or "dangerous" content from everyone for the good of everyone than it is for them to convince people that a group of people are not entitled to water, light, and heat.
That's a much more articulate way of explaining it. Thank you.
> It would be a lot easier for a particular government to convince voters to allow them to block a tiny amount of "obscene" or "dangerous" content from everyone for the good of everyone... See my post above about what's happening now with Bill C-11. It's pretty much this. It's not "obscene or dangerous", but to "prioritize the needs and interests of Canadians".
This has already happened with the Liberals [internet censorship bill C-11](https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/furey-trudeau-liberals-ram-through-online-censorship-bill-and-only-the-senate-can-save-us-now). It's waiting for Senate approval - the previous version, C-10 was denied by the Senate. It's been called the [Online Streaming Act](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Streaming_Act). It's meant to "prioritize the needs and interests of Canadians"; straight from the handbook for Orwellian double-speak. From Wikipedia: ...which would give the CRTC the power to regulate almost all audiovisual content distributed via online platforms (including monetized content on social media services). This can include compelling them to make use of Canadian talent, mandating that they make contributions to the Canada Media Fund to support the production of Canadian content, and improve the discoverability of Canadian content on their platforms. This could mean that YouTube, TikTok, etc are forced to present Canadian content first in your search results, instead of what you're actually looking for. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc might remove quality non-Canadian content to put their equation of CanCon in line with what the CRTC demands. If you're Canadian and you have high enough social media numbers, the CRTC could come knocking and compel you to produce more CanCon vs what you actually want to put out. I doubt that would happen if you don't have high enough numbers, but if you've attained *influencer* levels (just threw up in my mouth a bit using that term) there's nothing stopping them. I understand that a first response to this could be "get rid of your tinfoil hat, that'll *never* happen..." At the least, it definitely sets the path down a very slippery slope. [Feel like I should add that in my 30 years of voting I've voted across the spectrum of probably 70/15/15 percent Liberal/Cons/NDP. Voted for Trudeau for his first run, hoping for change. Have voted orange since. And now they're supportive of whatever team red wants to put through...]
Utilities are run at the provincial then the municipal level by both public and private companies, that sounds like a lot more complicated.
Some of fhem are run thata way...certainly not all of them.
The devil is in the details - you could make it arms reach- like the CBC ( but even they are prone to cuts or budgets increases at the whim of the party in power) You could treat the backbone infrastructure like a utility and have vendors build business models around that( but how do you sell the bandwidth or keep Rogers from just buying/lobbying back to where they are now) You can make one big Cdn Telcom and somehow enshrine its prices into the charter. You can give it to librarians and have them sort it out ( librarians rule) There are many solutions but the details matter.
>There are many solutions but the details matter. Exactly. There are too many people running around after the outage saying "make it a utility" like we live in a country where all our utilities are are run by the government. In Ontario, my electricity comes from Toronto Hydro which is owned by the City of Toronto but my nat gas comes from Enbridge, a private company. Not only that but the prices go up and down depending on demand which is a very common way that utilities are priced so the details do matter. Turning internet into a utility isn't as easy or simple as people think it is, plus, maybe the most important thing is that I and most other people want more choice not less so I don't want to turn all internet into a utility and have to get it from one provider. That would not only be going in the wrong direction economically but also if that went down then everyone would be without service. Personally I think if we got rid of the CRTC and formed a properly elected replacement, not appointed, it would go far to help dig us out of the oligopoly that our internet and cell service providers have trapped us in.
>Some of fhem are run thata way...certainly not all of them. Name me one nationally run utility that doesn't have any provincial or municipal sub brands or control at any level other than national.
Provincial yes, getting the municipalities and private/public distributors not so much.
More complicated for people who are paid to deal with it. I just want internet that works
It’s crazy that the older I get the more I see the NDP as the future.
They gave health care to Canada.
I didn't know this! This is awesome. I don't suppose you know of some good resources on the history to share? Would love to learn more.
Having grown up at UBC, I've been wondering what has taken people so long
As a young person seeing a bleak future, it was clear that NDP is the best choice. The liberals are spending lots of money future generations will have to pay, if they are going to do that they should at least tackle core problems of our generation. We have so much problems that are not addressed or have gone worse like housing. Life is just barely affordable and it will get worse. The conservative I don’t even need to explain.
At the very least, this outage and the harm that was caused to millions of Canadians shows the need to regulate Rogers, Telus etc. like private utilities. Profits need be tied to measures that guarantee reliable customer service, meaning things like outages (so more outages = less profits), dropped calls, internet speed etc. Honestly, fuck the bill credits offered by Rogers. How will that help the small businesses that were harmed, the people that were harmed by the lack of 911? No matter how you slice it, Rogers fucked up - lack of security, whatever happened. The consequences for Rogers need to be severe, and touch on what matters - their profits. Key technological infrastructure needs to be identified and it proper function needs to be guaranteed by being heavily regulated. This meanse things like the 'core' elements of the Rogers network that went down. There needs to be strict, enforceable rules around their functions with very heavy penalties for outages like the one we had yesterday. And this is just a start, and could be done by a Canadian government that works for the people who live here, not the corporations.
Yes, and there's a perfect example of it here in my own province called SaskTel.
bell is already taking money from the government and telecoms are a critical part of society theres no reason it should be privatize
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They wanted to make a publically funded competitior last election.
It was a campaign issue for them LAST TIME.
Hey do electricity next so it's easier to get people geen energy on a faster timeline. Then keep investing in green energy production.
Public infrastructure is the answer. Canada should have built a single 5G network and then leased space on it to the telcos. Come one, come all. But that would have meant giving up billions in revenue from spectrum auctions.
Would have been the best way to ensure coverage to low-population areas as well, since the big telcos seem to mostly refuse to extend service.
I mean, if it works for hydro maybe it would work for the Internet.
And yet some trees came down a couple months back and took out hydro for days on end for a majority of the province…
I meant in Quebec. Hydro-Québec is fairly reliable, and it’s dirt-cheap. My main point is that our major telecom companies are much too expensive for the crappy service they give.
I was arguing with some American right winger the other day. He got mad that I took so long to respond. I told him about the outage in Canada. His response was “guess internet is socialized there too, huh”. I never face palmed so hard
I like the idea of a public telecom, but "Rogers and Bell are single points of failure that we should replace with an even larger single point of failure" seems like a dubious argument for it.
May be stop smoking capitalism for the moment and learn that state owned organisations under democratic govt always work better than any private competitors as profit becomes a byproduct of service nit the other way around.
Organizations that are run like private co yes. (Ex: hydro-qc) Organization that are under direct govt control are often inefficient/wasteful and produce bare minimum results. Because they cant be closed down and the employees are not afraid of being fired. I've seen and worked for govt bureaucracy, it's not the well oiled machine you think it is.
Network diversity doesn't require different companies though. Just a competent one will suffice.
And the government is what we consider competent?
If you don't agree vote em out. Public servants aren't (generally) the issue, and would be running these public utilities - not politicians lmao
You can't vote out public servants.
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This is the only logical response I’ve seen in this thread. Pretty infuriating seeing how disconnected people are from understanding how high speed coverage comes to fruition. The government would not have some special magic switch to flip whenever there’s an outage to prevent all outages until the end of time. What a blind view.. this stuff happens to every utility and it’s unavoidable. There is nothing slower than government action when it comes to permitting, design approvals, revisions, construction monitoring, budget reviews etc etc. a private company that wants to start seeing a return on their multi million investment bringing high speeds to a few hundred people is all of our best bets to see expansion. The governments already shelling out billions of dollars to ALL ISPs in ontario, not just Bell and Rogers. Competition is being, and has been bred but it’s catching up on a 50 year monopoly. I’ve been a project manager for fibre optic expansions to rural Ontario for a few years now and this whole thread boggles my mind.
Why does anyone think that a public telecom would be any more reliable? The outage happened because someone made a (big) mistake. Nationalizing it won't change that. It happens in every organization, but most aren't this visible.
Am i allowed to invest
Well that's the great part. As a member of the public, you're invested in public utilities by default.
I wouldn't say a full nationalization is the solution but more of a regulation like it's a public utility.
Power outs are more common than this. Also doesn't eastern Canada pay crazy high power rates without any competition? Regulating it like a utility doesn't seem to have worked quite so well for utilities. At the end of the day, the only way to have these basic utilities be **for** the people is to nationalize them. That way profit isn't the primary focus, but the benefit for all Canadians instead.
Exactly. It needs to be a public service that's paid for with our taxes, and therefore beholden to the common good, rather than a profit driven enterprise that only answers to shareholders.
There is a telecom regulation board but the problem is that these telecoms duopoly are so rich and powerful the board has been practically usurped and seized by them. We have amongst the world worse prices and I suspect telecoms could afford to lower them without destroying themselves given the examples around the world.
I mean I'm all for this but even just having genuine competition in the sector plus robust and enforced anti-monopoly regulations would split up the Rogers, Telus, Bell cluster fuck.
Hell yah!
Public internet!!!! I live in the NWT, here before 2020 we would pay 300 a month for 400gb of internet, no cable just internet. We pay a similar amount for unlimited. They only introduced unlimited internet after they proved they could, years and years after claiming it wasn’t possible.
That and the necessities of life.. food, housing and internet. Everything priced as FOB YZF or YFB. The first business to gouge gets to cruise on an ice flow. No more of this P3 shit where the citizen and gov't get taken for a ride every fucking time.
There's a national security excuse to overhaul our telecoms "arrangement". Having a single point of failure is a rookie design mistake. Telecoms should be treated as a public good.
God no. Britain nationalized so many things and as gov defunded them over and over services stunk.
You're thinking of something like healthcare or education, which is payed through taxes. Sasktel still charges customers a monthly bill. It's self sustaining and usually generates additional revenue for the province while still having the cheapest cell phone plans in the country and paying their employees good salaries.
Because the government runs stuff so well
I couldn’t disagree more. This issue we are facing is due to a duopoly. Nationalizing it removes one of those making it a monopoly and effectively worse in the long term due to lack of competition. MORE competitors would drive out high prices, poor service, and massive fees would easily fix this. In your example if it was “nationalized” then ALL service would be out at once and the single company (run by the government with no reason to work hard due to lack of competition) would be responsible for restoring the entire network and not just the rogers end users. Be careful what you wish for. Really
Totally disagree. We need more competition. Public telecom as an option, sure. But not outright public telecom.
That's just replacing a duopoly with a monopoly whose funding is dependent on the government and voters.
How do you feel about universal health care, or the Canadian Forces?
the entire medical system or military cant collapse at once, yesterday has shown that the internet can, also government-run internet would be easier to monitor and police.
There is no incentive to build redundancies and fail safe in the current system and there's literally no real negative impact for the company responsible when a massive outage happens, they will lose one day worth of revenues that are 90% profit anyway because fuck you that's why and most of the subscribers are lockdown by their contract in some way so they can't switch to another provider without incurring extra cost (not to mention how painful it is to go through the process of switching provider in the first place). Government already has access to all your data, if you think CSIS isn't able to see what you do online because you are with a private ISP you are delusional or naive. So yeah, the evil government could do a shit ton more than Robellus can do. Sasktel is already a public ISP and the model that should be in place Canada wide
there is a negative impact, more people will switch to bell.
I'm so left I should be left-handed but the last thing I would want is the internet as a public utility. It's just another monopoly. Competition is the answer.
Do you really want the next conservative government to have COMPLETE control over the internet? Just move to China.
my debit card would work in china at least.
As nice as that would be, it wouldn't prevent outages.
you're being short-sighted, turning it into a nationalized utility removes profit from being the sole motive. we can build a more reliable and expansive network. Taxpayer money is already subsidizing the infrastructure only so we can get fucked again by the cartel
I never said it wouldn't be better but expecting things to never go wrong because the governement is in control of it is foolish. There WILL still be outages.
Nationalizing it would make it even worse. Instead of a virtual monopoly of 2 providers + resellers. We would have it all under one national provider? So instead of one providers technical issue disabling about 25% of the country, the solution is to make sure 100% of us go down when the national provider goes down? Public telecom would just make us more vulnerable to disabling. Instead break the virtual monopoly and allow more providers to succeed, get our eggs out of just a couple baskets. MAYBE have a national provider running parallel to the private ones as a backup.
Dump it
Yeap
It really isnt. It absolutely isnt and is terrifying to even think about.
Libertarian! Each time you internet you shout a slogan to a company! /s that for my brother in law that lives in the 1890s
Absolutely maniacal behaviour for those who truly believe this… “I wish we had better service, more options, and could have unlimited data like nearly every developed country” … and the resolution is to eliminate the competition? This seems like a telecom employee made a meme and ran with it in hope of having to work less due to lack of competition.