Mediamorphis

A week-and-a-half ago I met up with Birgitta Jónsdóttir, an activist Icelandic MP and central figure in the Twitter-Wikileaks cases (see earlier posts on the topic here, here, here and here). Passing time on Twitter, I saw she was in Ottawa, sent her a tweet, quickly received a reply and presto, we met on a Sunday afternoon with a fellow professor [...]

The Guardian ran a great set of articles last week, the “Battle for the Internet”.  It included essays, video-shorts and interviews with the A-list of the Twitterati, bloggers, pundits, and OSPs (other smart people), from Clay Shirky, dayna boyd, Evgeny Morozov, Emily Bell, and more. Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, director and major shareholder kicked things off [...]

Dear All, In this letter I want to offer my sincerest apology to Sheila Copps, the President of the National Press Club, for comments made in my open letter to the members and directors of the NPC two weeks ago. For those of you who read the letter, you will recall that I was deeply [...]

In the middle of last week the CRTC began to solicit views on whether or not a national code for wireless services is necessary. The CRTC had received several applications, it said, suggesting that such a code might be needed. Who might want such a code?  The big wireless providers, Rogers, Bell and Telus, that’s who, [...]

Sometimes you work hard on things, throw your all into it, and hope that good things come as a result. For the last several months I’ve been doing this with the National Press Club, after being elected as member of the board of directors of the Club in October last year. The National Press Club [...]

A new brouhaha has broken out in the U.S. over actions taken by Comcast that give its television and video services delivered via Microsoft’s Xbox a free pass, while still applying bandwidth caps to rival over-the-top television services such as Netflix, Apple TV, HBO Go, etc. It’s the latest frontier in the network neutrality disputes [...]

Last month I visited Auckland, New Zealand to give a talk at the The Future with High Speed Broadband Conference organized by the Competition Commission (full paper here). The aim was to assess the factors that might encourage or hobble the country’s plan to make ultrafast, broadband internet service available to all. The Ultrafast Broadband Initiative, and [...]

Sometimes I just wish I could wake up in the morning and not be thrust into the hurly-burly of all the stuff roiling the telecom-media-Internet industries in Canada. But no! If it ain’t copyright maximalists trying to lock up content (Bill C-11) or spooks trying to stuff the telecom-Internet infrastructure with new surveillance gear (Bill [...]

I often write about the Internet and its place in the broader network media ecology in relation to three things: That core elements of the network media ecology are becoming more concentrated: e.g. ISPs, search engines, social networking sites, browsers, operating systems, traditional media; Efforts to turn ISPs and other digital intermediaries into copyright police, [...]

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve been away for a while. Sorry about that for those of you who missed me. Let’s just say that I learned the hard way the steep cost of blogging, twitter, facebook, writing for the Globe and Mail, all for free, while holding down a real paying job [...]