Steve Anderson's blog

Pro-Internet community,

We're hearing a lot about the Big Three cell phone giants' terrible treatment of customers, and about their plans to take more control of the market. We’re getting more active on this file as result: we at OpenMedia.ca are preparing a response to Big Telecom’s stranglehold on the cell phone market.

We met with the Industry Minister’s office last year and made it very clear that Canadians expect them to fix our broken telecom market. They seemed to hear us, but we’re worried that they may be poised to hand off newly-freed wireless spectrum to Big Telecom, thereby killing independent options for cell phone/mobile Internet service. Read more »

In November, many in the pro-Internet community rightly celebrated the CRTC’s decision on usage-based billing (Internet metering)—it was a major milestone.

The Internet metering decision was fundamentally a step forward towards an open an affordable Internet in Canada. The structure and policy both make sense: the CRTC clearly made an attempt to apply a pricing model that is based on costs, and they rejected usage-based pricing outright.

The only issue is with the underlying infrastructure costs applied to independent Internet Service Providers. Indie ISPs now say Big Telecom (of course) has snuck punitive and greatly inflated costs into the CRTC’s new pricing model. They did this through complex policy submissions to the CRTC. Read more »

OpenMedia.ca spoke with Industry Minister Christian Paradis’ office via teleconference earlier this fall. We also brought one of our public interest lawyers, David Fewer, from CIPPIC with us. We asked you to help set the agenda by filling out our pro-Internet survey and sharing your thoughts via our FacebookPage and on Twitter, and we did our best to hit as many of your points as possible. Our two-hour conversation was largely successful. One high point came when Paradis’ senior policy advisor indicated support for the idea of imposing financial penalties on internet openness violators.

I’m writing this blog to report back to you, the pro-Internet community, on the meeting’s details. Read on to learn more about how our industry minster’s office sees digital policy in Canada. Read more »

Image by balleyne on Flickr

Canada has an Internet "openness and access deficit." That was the starting point for OpenMedia.ca's "Casting an Open Net" report published earlier this year. The report noted three disturbing practices employed by several of Canada's dominant Internet Service Providers (ISPs):

1. Many Canadian ISPs (Bell, Rogers and Shaw) selectively limit access to certain online services in a practice known as "throttling," or the slowing down of Internet traffic. This renders certain services almost unusable, as expressed in the recent complaint against Rogers, submitted to the CRTC, regarding the ISP's throttling of World of Warcraft, a popular online game. Read more »

Yesterday morning I took part in a televised debate with the Canadian Police Association President Tom Stamatakis on the government's impending "Lawful Access", or Online Spying legislation. Check out the debate...

Read more »

The first few days of our Stop Online Spying public education campaign were incredible. Thank you, Canadians, for spreading the word about the proposed warrantless online spying bills—it's working! The government has kept citizens in the dark about these new surveillance powers, but thanks to the video and audio spots made and shared by Canadians, the word is getting out.

Our PSA-style videos have been viewed over 80,000 times in just a few days, and the Stop Online Spying petition has now been signed nearly 70,000 times. Clearly the pro-Internet community makes up one of the most dynamic movements in the country—it's the largest of it's kind in the world. Let's keep going. Read more »