The CRTC is making a lot of good moves lately: eliminating the requirement to give 30 days' notice before abandoning a cable subscription is both sensible and substantially good. And insisting on making decisions based on evidence is right, and  taking pride in basing one's decisions on evidence is understandable.  Running the risk of being a dinosaur is the fate of anyone over forty, but try not to be one.

The regulatory debate this week at CNOC's ISP summit  was a jolly good Australian-style punch-up between Michael Geist and Jonathan Daniels of Bell. 

Our planning for it is deplorable, at the moment. An Internet-centric 9-1-1 needs to be planned by people who understand the Internet. Does this not seem obvious? Then why is our planning process excluding them? Because we have no adequate planning process.

Here is a presentation I made at the Toronto ISP Summit in November 2014.

Today's Hi and Lois says it all. Lois: "What's on TV tonight?" [The each member of the  family is watching their own device] "Who cares?" asks Chip the teenaged son. Who cares indeed?

The ladders of investment are lonely creatures.They wander the plains of the Regulatorium, a vast continent whose middle is   populated by very few, very large idea-creatures, who dwarf the ladders of investment.  These bigger creatures graze on consumer surplus, and run into each other at large water holes, where they bellow their challenges to each other and complain that the game wardens should allow them more pasturage and eliminate both their larger rivals and the new smaller creatures which try to graze on their pasturage.

Sometimes a question can send you back to first principles. Yesterday I heard one, and it kept me awake last night while I pondered it.

The question was asked by a Commissioner at the mobile wholesale hearing. It went like this. "The mobile sector has seen the most wonderful progress in the last twenty years. The landline side is in relative decline. Yet you say we should apply more of the approach we adopted for ensuring landline competition worked for mobile. Can you explain why? Is that not a contradiction?"

Is it time to break up the CRTC into separate brodcasting and telecommunications agencies? I think so.

The CRTC has climbed down from its untenable position on regulating the Internet. It has huffed and puffed and struck Netflix' testimony from the record, which is about as sensible as striking Trotsky from the pictures with Lenin and Stalin. Or as Andrew Coyne remarks today, like the characters in Hamlet, ignoring the oncoming army of Fortinbras, which will put an end to the whole crew in Elsinore Castle.

The  Klingon Empire salutes you, Chairman Blais. According to reports we have heard from reliable sources, you have deliberately arranged this confrontation with the Internet.

The CRTC vs. Netflix fight is beginning. Its conclusion - unless the Commission backs off -will  mark the end of its claim to regulate the Canadian portion of the Internet.

I can understand why large carriers in the United States are so opposed to municipal networks that they pay off state legislatures to pass legislation banning municipal investment in networks. America is the land with the best legislation money can buy. I understand why their legions of myrmidons applaud this as the only proper course of action. What I cannot understand is why everyone else seems to think this is economically rational and socially beneficial.

Terence Corcoran is the senior editor of the Financial Post. He is a committed opponent of a host of economic follies: unfunded liabilities, statism,  junk science - of which the largest example is anthropogenic global warming, and a host of fashionable fads. On the subject of network industries, however, I regret to say he is persistently wrong, seriously, radically in error.

His latest outburst of rage was vented against the government's decision to reserve spectrum for a smaller player in the Canadian wireless market. He has been waging a long, and so far unsuccessful, campaign to shape public opinion away from the Conservative government's attempts to introduce more competition into domestic wireless communications.

The German subsidiary of Verizon has lost the contract to provide telecommunications services to the Bundestag. The German interior ministry said the cancellation was linked to the "relationship between foreign intelligence agencies and companies" that the rogue US National Security Agency contractor exposed last year.

The Financial Times reported:

"Among the revelations, it emerged that Verizon was required by a court order to hand over information about telephone calls on its network to the NSA on an “ongoing, daily” basis. The order barred the company from publicly disclosing the existence of the request"

As any self-respecting nation state would do, Germany has taken measures to restrict NSA's access to parliamentary telephone calls, through its agent, Verizon. Would you not do the same in their shoes?

What is the nature of the Internet? I ask this question as I listened to a discussion of Internet security features. The more fundamental answers to the question can be found in one of my articles, "The Internet Illustrated" on this site. But there is another approach to thinking about the Internet, as an addressing system for reaching endpoints. Forgive me if all this is obvious.

http://www.vox.com/2014/4/27/5655622/congress-could-fix-the-net-neutrality-mess-but-it-probably-wont

A good fast review of the US situation is offered here.

Mobile television apps are now before the CRTC. They put the question at the heart of Canadian communications policy front and centre: will carriers be able to evade net neutrality rules whenever they declare their signal to be "broadcasting"?

There is a contradiction between the two statutes the CRTC administers. The Broadcasting Act says "go forth and discriminate infavour of Canadian programming". The Telecommunications Act says "thou shalt not discriminate among signals except for very good reason, and the CRTC will rule on the adequacy of that reason".

The Canadian Speech from the Throne (SFT) is the traditional method for the government to announce its policies and proposals for the coming Parliamentary session. The most recent one signals important changes to the regulation of telecommunications and broadcasting, in a strongly interventionist direction.

A wise head of regulatory affairs for a large Canadian multi-media player once told me: "Every so often the politicians of this country abandon market economics and throw the carriers under the bus." It seems like the Cabinet is getting a taste for doing so.

The revelations that the National Security Agency has been spying on the Internet's traffic, and that corporations like Google  would be obliged to lie about the degree of their cooperation, has come as a shock to the naive, and an opportunity for those who would like to detach the governance of the Internet from the United States. That includes many autocratic nations, as well as some constitutional democracies.

When the US established the governing institutions for the Internet in 1998, they had to deal with two different issues: a) how to keep the Internet from falling into the hands of the ITU (International telecommunications Union) which is a treaty-based UN organization, and b) how to arrange the governance so that companies and civil society groups could play an active role.

Let me begin with what I know to be true. Over the course of the time I was there, a Commissioners had growing sense of the inadequacy of facilities-based competition, with a limited duopoly of cable and telco in each market.

There are two problems with moving to a policy of leased access to cable (coaxial) and telephone (optical fiber and copper pair) infrastructure. One is ideological, and I will deal with that shortly. The second is historical.