Columns

What Do You Want the Internet To Be?

My weekly Law Bytes column (homepage version) highlights several potential Canadian policies that may create a very different Internet. They include ubiquitous network surveillance through the lawful access initiative, ISPs that engage in packet preferencing as in the two cases last week involving Vonage and Telkom Kenya, a new extended license that would require schools to pay millions of dollars for content that is currently freely available on the Internet, and rules that make it far easier to remove an allegedly infringing song than to remove dangerous child pornography. It concludes by riffing on an old Nortel ad campaign by asking whether this is really what we want the Internet to be?

Since the column now appears in slightly different form in several papers including the Toronto Star and Ottawa Citizen, I'm now linking to those versions (as available) as well as my own version of the column which will include links to background information and other materials.
Update: The Ottawa Citizen version of the column is now online and freely available.

Further Update: Canada.com has just added my column to their technology section. It will appear there weekly without registration requirements.

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