Blang!

Last week the governments Competition Policy Review Panel released its report which recommended, among other things that foreign ownership rules for telecom companies be relaxed to promote competition.

Predictably, Canada’s largest Telecom Union, the Communications Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada disagrees arguing that Canada should retain ownership of its telecom industry something he claims Canadians are “overwhelmingly” in favour of in “poll after poll”.

It’s not hard to trump up poll results showing Canadians are against foreign ownership simply by injecting a little fear into the questions, just like Mr. Coles does in his statements to the media.

“Privacy for individuals and security for the nation are both threatened by placing our critical telecommunications infrastructure into foreign hands.”

That’s right Canada, if you could get your cell phone service from Verizon, terrorists will be knocking at your door.

Fear mongering has worked in the past but it’s starting to wear a little thin.

Ironic then that Canadians are getting a dose of exactly what that lack of foreign ownerhsip looks like with the “release” of the iPhone. I put “release” in quotes because “release” implies some kind of freedom which couldn’t be farther from the truth with the plans available from Rogers.

It’s not a poll, but the citizens over at http://www.ruinediphone.com/ don’t seem to understand why the iPhone plans in Canada are the most expensive in the world.

I guess someone forgot to explain to them that the security of the nation is at stake!

Actually, it’s not the security of the nation that’s at stake, but its economy.

What the Competition panel correctly recognizes is that if Canada doesn’t get more competitive telecommunications soon, Canadian business will simply not be able to compete in the digital age.

Last week Jim Prentice finally did what he has been threatening to do since last fall, he introduced the Canadian version of the DMCA. As usual Michael Geist has been doing a good job publicizing details of the legislation and so has CBC’s Search Engine, who conducted an interview with Jim Prentice.

Poor Jim didn’t do so well appearing downright confused about the bill stating the issues are “arcane” and that the “bill is very large”. Jim, it doesn’t matter how large the bill is. If you are going to impose it on us, you better know it inside and out!

Jim also tried to dismiss the impact of the law by saying enforcement wasn’t likely because the statutory damages wouldn’t be enough of a motivating factor to sue consumers and that digital locks on content won’t impact consumers because “market forces” will prevent media companies from using them.

If this bill is such a good idea, why is the minister spending all his time downplaying its impact? Can you imagine any other anti-crime bill where the minister goes out of his way to “reassure” the public that it won’t be effective?

The fact is, once this law is passed, the “digital locks” provision of the bill ensures that Canadians will have lost all rights to their own content and devices! Just transferring a “digitally locked” CD to an iPod, or recording a TV show that has the broadcast flag set will be illegal.

The minister likes to blab on about how the law allows for time shifting, and other “user rights” provisions while conveniently ignoring the fact that if the content is digitally locked, all of those rights are irrelevant.

With some luck perhaps we will have another election before the bill passes and Prentice will be defeated.

I haven’t posted here in a long time not because I haven’t had something to say, but because I’m trying to find some other blog software other than Wordpress. Nothing wrong with Wordpress but I need a Wiki and I was hoping to find something that combines both. I’ll probably just resort to running a Wiki in parallel to the blog.

Never one to be accused of being too ahead of the curve, I have finally setup what is commonly known as a blog. I’m so late to this game that blogging is already passé. I don’t, in fact expect anyone to actually read this blog and it is more just a place for me to dump some information for future reference and do the occasional rant against things that are especially annoying.

Since I’m an IT professional I often explore various technologies and work on projects which are quite complex and interesting. Along the way you learn a lot of small details which are often quickly forgotten which is quite frustrating the next time you have to do something similar. Mainly these things are not recorded because there is no simple mechanism to do this nor any easy way of storing this information. And so I’m hoping I can capture some of these details here on this web site so I’ll have a sort of personal knowledge base.