Technology Info

Google Inc. says Bell Canada Inc. is breaking Canadian telecommunications law by slowing certain internet traffic, and is urging the CRTC to take action against the company.

“Bell claims its throttling of peer-to-peer applications is a reasonable form of network management. Google respectfully disagrees. Network management does not include Canadian carriers’ blocking or degrading lawful applications that consumers wish to use,” the company wrote in a 15-page submission to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which was made public over the weekend.

“From consumer, competition and innovation perspectives, throttling applications that consumers choose is inconsistent with a content and application-neutral internet, and a violation of Canadian telecommunications law, which forbids unfair discrimination and undue or unreasonable preferences and requires that regulation be technologically and competitively neutral.” (link)

Rogers Communications Inc. announced earlier this month that it will bring the iPhone to Canada on July 11 at the same prices as AT&T, but it will require customers to sign three-year contracts. The company sells a number of phones with the option of one-, two- or three-year contracts, where the shorter the deal is, the more the customer pays for the device up front. The iPhone, however, will be the only device with just the three-year option.

A spokesperson for Rogers declined to comment as to why Canadian customers will have longer contracts than their counterparts in other countries.

“While I won’t speak to our contractual agreement, all carriers are different,” Elizabeth Hamilton said.

While it is possible another carrier elsewhere in the world could announce it will sell the iPhone under a three-year contract, a longer term than that is unheard of, making Rogers’ plans the longest. (link)

Bell Canada Inc. has been ordered to publicly disclose information that details the level of congestion on its network in regard to a dispute over the company’s internet speed-throttling practices.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission on Thursday told the company it has until June 23 to make public data that was marked confidential in a May 29 filing. Bell had said it needed to keep quiet the information, which details the level of internet traffic and possible congestion on its network, for competitive reasons.

In a letter sent to Bell, CRTC director general of competition, costing and tariffs Paul Godin said the need for public disclosure outweighed the company’s competitive privacy concerns.

“Commission staff has determined, based on all the material before it, that no specific direct harm would likely result from disclosure, or that the public interest in disclosure outweighs any specific direct harm that might result from disclosure,” he wrote. (link)

Of all the available digital download Websites in Canada, member reward company Aeroplan is the first to convert all of its available music tracks to DRM-free, “high-quality” MP3 files. Aeroplan members can now redeem accumulated points for music at the company’s digital download site (www.aeroplanmusicstore.com) from all four major record labels: EMI, Sony BMG Music (Canada), Universal, and Warner Music. Songs range from 256 kbps to 320 kbps, with most tunes downloadable in the latter, higher quality format.

“We are proud to be leading the industry in an area that our members are showing increasing interest,” said Nathalie Belanger, General Manager, Rewards Management, Aeroplan. “Our miles for music offering has been extremely popular with Aeroplan Members, in fact, for many, downloading music from our site was their first foray into one of the many specialty, merchandise, and experiential rewards that we also offer. Now that we are making music even more accessible, we expect more members will give it a try.” (link)

A skirmish has been raging for days over the online Wikipedia biography of Industry Minister Jim Prentice, with anonymous government workers airbrushing out controversial details or buffing Prentice’s image, while others just as quickly revised the revisions.

So intense was the battle that Prentice’s biography was locked Thursday by Wikipedia administrators “due to vandalism.”

Literally hundreds of changes had been made to Prentice’s biography over the past week, with many originating from IP addresses that were traced to Industry Canada computers at the department’s Queen Street address in downtown Ottawa.

“Even though someone from within Industry Canada thought they were making these changes anonymously - and they are, in the sense of not knowing the precise individual - it was not very difficult to trace back the fact these changes were coming from within the department,” Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa, said Thursday in an interview. (link)

Digital technology is putting the power of a computer onto credit and debit cards to help cut down on fraud.

Cards are being embedded with a microchip, or a tiny computer. That means the traditional swiping of a credit or debit card and signing a credit card slip won’t be necessary.

Visa Canada, MasterCard Canada Inc. and Interac Association are moving to bring Canada in line with card technology that’s already in use in much of Europe and parts of Asia and Latin America.

“The key driver for this is really on the security side,” said Michael Stephenson, Visa’s senior business manager of the chip initiative. (link)

ACTA could make the information on Canadian iPods, laptop computers or other personal electronic devices illegal and greatly increase the difficulty of travelling with such devices.
On October 23, 2007, the Canadian Federal Government announced that Canada will participate in preliminary discussions with the United States, Mexico, the European Union, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and other countries toward an anti-counterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA).

The main objective of ACTA would be to develop international standards to better combat the trade in counterfeit trademarked and pirated copyright goods. Provisions would focus on international cooperation, enforcement practices and legal frameworks, including enforcement systems. (DigitalJournal)

Facebook is the focus of a new complaint in Canada over its privacy policies and practices. The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) filed the complaint this morning, asking the Privacy Commissioner of Canada to review what the CIPPIC believes are various violations of Canadian privacy law. There are 22 violations in all, says CIPPIC, making Facebook “a minefield of privacy invasion.”

Facebook’s policies and practices were analyzed by a “team of law students” over the winter, resulting in their discovery of what they believe to be numerous violations of the Canadian Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). Some of the issues raised in the complaint are a little benign: for example, CIPPIC takes issue with the fact that all of a user’s friends can see Wall posts (comments) left by other friends, and that it’s not easy to simply delete all Wall posts with a single click. Other issues, however, are more serious, like a user’s inability to easily delete his or her account and all the data associated with it. (Instead, users can choose to suspend their accounts, leaving their data dormant with Facebook—for potential reactivation—for an unspecified amount of time.) (ArsTechnica)

Gaming, as an industry, has become an economic powerhouse. The growth of the industry in the US is exceeding the overall growth of the US economy, and is in fact a bright spot in an otherwise dour picture of the nation’s finances. Game developers are creating a product that is doing very well in even the worldwide market, and where these companies set up shops, jobs and cash follow. Developers in the UK are now pressuring the government to step up tax breaks for the gaming industry, and they’re wielding a very real stick: developers have already begun to flee for the greener pastures of Canada.

15 game companies have joined a lobbying group called “Games Up?” to fight for better benefits in the UK. “All our key competitors offer tax breaks and grants, putting UK developers at a disadvantage,” said Richard Wilson, a chief executive of Tiga, the UK trade organization for game developers. (ArsTechnica)

Sometimes I get the itch to work in PR. No, it doesn’t happen much, but once in a while I see the sort of inexplicable corporate decision that makes me long to have been in the room when it was being discussed. Case in point: yesterday’s announcement from Bell Canada that the telecom behemoth was officially launching its downloadable video store… just as Bell is caught up in a government inquiry into its traffic-shaping practices. It’s hard to imagine a time at which touting your own downloadable video store makes less sense than when you’re on the hot seat for throttling all P2P traffic, much of which competes with Bell to offer video (including entirely legal BitTorrent downloads from the CBC). Yes, you could look worse as a company, but puppies and shotguns would probably need to be involved. (ArsTechnica)