Relay-Version: ANU News - V6.1B9 05/16/94 VAX/VMS V6.1; site commgw Path: commgw!nott!cunews!superior!swyerxa Newsgroups: can.infohighway Subject: CRTC Intervention (P-IHAC) Message-ID: From: swyerxa@superior.carleton.ca (Shawn W. Yerxa) Date: Sun, 19 Feb 1995 14:36:51 GMT Sender: news@cunews.carleton.ca (News Administrator) Organization: Carleton University X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL0] Lines: 479 Allan J. Darling, Secretary General Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0N2 February 13, 1994 RE: Notice of Public Hearing CRTC 1994-18 - Second Round Dear Secretary General: Please find enclosed our submission for the second round of submissions in the public hearing resulting from Notice of Public Hearing CRTC 1994- 18/Public Notice CRTC 1994-130. Included is a hard copy of our submission as well as a single diskette with ASCII text and Wordperfect 5.1 (dos) files of the same (P-IHAC18.ASC and P-IHAC18.WP1). This submission is filed on behalf of the Public Information Highway Advisory Council, an Internet based group concerned with public interest issues in the development of communications policy. Once again, we would like to express our desire to appear at the public hearing. As per the Notice we state four reasons for such an appearance: - To emphasize the importance of and lack of public representation in this process. - To add further emphasis to the arguments iterated herein and in our initial intervention. - To discuss and emphasize the support for the enclosed submission which has been solicited over the past two months. - To provide for an opportunity to comment orally on submissions, as yet unknown, resulting from the second stage of this hearing process. Sincerely, __________________________ Shawn W. Yerxa for: Marita Moll and Shawn W. Yerxa Co-ordinators - The Public Information Highway Advisory Council ba439@FreeNet.Carleton.CA ---------------------------------------------------- The Public - Information Highway Advisory Council's Second Round Intervention In Response to Notice of Public Hearing CRTC 1994-18/ Public Notice CRTC 1994-130 February 13, 1995 Prepared and Submitted by Marita Moll and Shawn Yerxa Co-coordinators of P-IHAC ba439@FreeNet.Carleton.CA Contents 1. Summary 2. Support - First Round Intervention 3. Summary of Concerns - First Round Intervention 4. Further Concerns - Responses to Other Interventions 5. Drawing Attention - Support for Other Interventions 6. Conclusion - Defining the Public's Interest Appendix A - Expressions of Support for the First Round P-IHAC Intervention 1. Summary This intervention contains expressions of support for P-IHAC's first round intervention, a reiteration of our primary concerns, our concerns and comments with respect to other first round interventions, and a conclusion which discusses the public's interest in the matters under discussion. P-IHAC's first round intervention has received considerable support from 96 individual Canadians and organizations. We believe that this support demonstrates strong popular support for a public interest agenda which the CRTC and the Government should respect. Such an agenda would see our concerns addressed prior to the protection or promotion of the interests of specific industrial sectors; some of which may indeed be moving toward redundancy. Our concerns with this procedure in particular and the processes of the CRTC in general are once again specified. Our general policy recommendations, and the government's apparent failure to recognize them are more clearly presented. The positions put forward in the first round by the various commercial parties was, to a great extent, predictable and uninteresting. Stentor, Unitel, the CCTA, the CAB, WIC, RCI, Shaw, and the CBTA all engaged in their traditional turf protection, and have contributed little of substance to this process. Beneath this layer of dominant commercial voices are many interesting and persuasive interventions. We wish to draw attention to some of them. In particular we want to focus the Commissions attention on some of the common threads found in the interventions and the key points they and we endorse. Prior to this, several problematic interventions cause us significant concern and warrant being discussed. Perhaps the most distressing intervention came from the Director of Investigation and Research and is discussed below. Others, as identified above, contribute only volume. The intervention made by the CBTA (Comment # 632) should receive little weight due to this organizations unparalleled consumer power. An additional concern is raised by the organized effort by the cable industry to demonstrate support for a failed community access program. A program which the industry hopes will be the model for a public lane on the information highway. Such a program would only worsen spread to other media the depth and scope of problems encountered in community access programming. We wish to draw attention to several interventions which we feel offer interesting, thoughtful, and helpful directions. The considerable overlap between P-IHAC's concerns and these interventions suggests a wide range of choice exists outside of the Stentor/Cable company/Industry Canada agenda. We support these groups in their calls for: - A Royal Commission to Overhaul the related Acts. - A single-wire system. - The adoption of a telecommunications model over a broadcast model for the new media. - Full and free public access to all crown copyright material. - Allowing redundant industries to "go broke." - New ways to support Canadian culture. - The need for improved protection of personal information. 2. Support - First Round Intervention P-IHAC has, in a previous intervention (94-11), pointed out to the Commission the great difficulties faced by Canadians interested in participating in this process. We have asked the Commission to make its process more open, more accessible to the Canadian people. We applaud the Commission for making some of the submissions to this hearing available through its World Wide Web page. This initiative has made it much easier for some interested parties to become aware of the issues at stake and the positions of various intervenors. We recommend that Commission continue to upgrade the www.crtc.gc.ca site to make it more comprehensive and useful. However, Order in Council P.C. 1994-1689 refers to "the fundamental importance of the issues under review," and the need for "a thorough airing of views prior to the government making its final policy determinations." We must point out that using electronic media only to distribute information is not sufficient to widen public participation in this process. The Information Highway is a two-way medium. There must be a corresponding mechanism for the public to speak to the Commission. It should be possible for interventions and letters of support to be submitted to the Commission electronically. We recommend that the Commission set up procedures as soon as possible to handle electronic messages, receiving, recording and responding to these in the same way as it does to post and fax messages. In view of the fact that it is not yet possible for the public to use electronic media to contact the Commission, we ask that the 96 expressions of support sent to P-IHAC electronically (attached as Appendix A) be recorded as letters of support for the P-IHAC intervention. After circulating a call for support electronically these letters were received from individuals and organizations across Canada. Many of those who support the intervention have added their own comments, criticisms, and specific concerns. These Canadians deserve to be heard in this process. We request the Commission consider each one of them as a unique letter of support. 3. Summary of Concerns - First Round Intervention For ease of reference and emphasis, and to provide a context for considering some of the other interventions submitted to this hearing, we wish to re-state, in summary form, our concerns and recommendations, as presented in our first round intervention. This intervention addresses several areas of concern: Procedural: The intervention points out several procedural limitations created by the government's use of the CRTC as a policy forum for these issues. The limitations prohibit representative participation by the public and therefore favours the positions of large corporate participants at the expense of public, consumer, and small business positions. We urge the CRTC to make these limitations clear to the government in its report. Government Policy and Questions: The government ordered the CRTC to hold this hearing and in doing so placed a policy position before participants for comment. This policy calls for competition between companies and interconnection of facilities (cable and telephone) in order to create jobs, reinforce sovereignty and cultural identity, and ensure universal access at affordable cost. In this context the government asks a series of questions regarding facilities, content, and competition. This intervention argues that the government's policies will not translate into the desired goals. Many of the problems are created by attempting to impose an outdated broadcasting model (a one-way, one-to-many, corporate model) on the new converged media. This model restricts free speech by requiring Canadian communication to be subjected to commercial constraints. Facilities: Interoperability combined with pseudo-competition between a few large corporations will not provide the universal access, jobs, and cultural protection the government claims. Competition of this type will degrade the quality of service and increase costs for small users. This intervention supports interconnection and interoperability of the cable and telephone networks but not in the context of competition between facilities. The government asks whether the definitions of broadcasting and telecommunications service need to be reviewed. This intervention recommends that a review of these definitions should be undertaken only after a reworking of the definitions of "service," "programming," "non- programming," and "content." A review of these terms may find the government's model unworkable. Content: In a two way communications environment, every Canadian can be a content provider. Culture can best be served by allowing a massive increase in the number of people and organizations able participate, create, communicate, and innovate. We warn that applying the broadcasting model to the information highway will significantly muddle the future of the emerging new medium. Arbitrary distinctions will have to be made regarding "acceptable use" and "content." This will result in service providers and carriers being responsible for the material they carry, as they are in the broadcasting model. We recommend, instead, the telecommunications model, in which the originator is responsible for the material. Competition: We argue that quality, fair distribution, and access may be more important to Canadians than innovation and efficiency, as suggested by the government. Quality, fairness, and access are not necessarily best served by competition. Convergence Alternatives: The public model of information highway development offered in this intervention would: - Re-establish and maintain the distinction between carrier and content, an important mechanism for ensuring privacy, quality, and access. - Maintain and expand the principal of universal access, a recognition that all citizens regardless of geographic location or socio-economic status must be able to participate in the communications of a democratic society. - Control costs to the individual of using the information highway costs would be designed to encourage maximum use, would not be distance, time, or volume sensitive. - Ensure privacy and security for personal information by requiring explicit and repeated consent for its use. - Preserve the radio spectrum as public space. 4. Further Concerns - Responses to Other First Round Interventions A diverse collection of recommendations has been set before the Commission as a result of the first round of interventions in this process. P-IHAC supports many of the positions put forward and calls attention to those in the next section (see part 5). We also wish to raise our concern about some other interventions. As members of the Canadian public, we feel that the most problematic of these interventions comes from the office of the Director of Investigation and Research (see Comment #226). As a public office, the Director should place the Canadian public at the heart of their concerns. In Comment #226, the Director offers only unsupported assertions and questionable research of the benefits to industry and consumers of a competitive communications system. The Director does not make a single mention of the Canadian public or public policy concerns, only those of consumers and corporations. We will encourage Canadians to bring this failure to the attention of Industry Canada and the Cabinet. We hope that the Commission considers the failure of public representation in this process as only compounded by such submissions. The Commission should question the Director with respect to these concerns should the office appear before the Commission in March. With the notable exceptions of Telus # 246 and the Government of Saskatchewan # 208, the interventions made by the various immediate commercial concerns in this process, namely the telephone companies, cable companies, and their respective lobbyists and associations, illustrate their traditional positions and voluminous rhetoric. What should be emphasised, and is clearly demonstrated by their submissions, is that these organizations work in the interests of their shareholders. It adds maddening irony to this process that the shareholders of the corporations are funded, in their representations to the Commission, by rate-payers while the public is not funded making it difficult for institutions which should speak on its behalf. The least weight in this proceeding should be attached to the most powerful force in this debate, the high volume telecommunications users as represented here by the Canadian Business Telecommunications Alliance (see Comment # 632) and others (Comment # 259). The power these users have in the market place and before the Commission has been clearly demonstrated in the move to a competitive telecommunications environment, a move which has benefited them most. We are also concerned about the organized effort by the Cable industry to garner support from numerous MP's and constituents in Canada in support of Community Access Cable (numerous Comments). This foreshadows the cable industries goal of carrying a "public lane" on the information highway which will, if left as poorly structured as the Community Access Cable system, be of similarly limited utility for the public. The disproportionate distribution of resources and unequal access to this proceeding with respect to industry and the general public should be recognized and emphasized when evaluating these submissions. 5. Drawing Attention - Support for Other Interventions On a more positive note, the Commission has a plethora of innovative and productive offerings to chose from when compiling its report to the government. We wish to draw attention to several. The procedural problems we speak of are effectively addressed by the CAC and NAPO (see Comment # 398). Any recommendations or comments made to the government must emphasize this issue. The considerable research conducted and submitted by the Telecommunications Workers Union (see Comment # 227), particularly its extensive practical and important list of recommendations should receive considerable attention. Other interventions which provide important public centred or innovative recommendations are those made by the: Andrew Clement (Comment # 431) B.C. Pubic Interest Advocacy Centre (Comment # 420) Consumers Association of Canada (Comment # 398) Frank Spiller (Comment # 082) Friends of Canadian Broadcasting (Comment # 429) Government of Saskatchewan (Comment # 208) Information and Privacy Commissioner of B.C. (Comment # 465) Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario (Comment # 052) Inuit Tapirisat of Canada (Comment # 553) Mark Surman (Comment # 436) McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology (Comment # 428) National Anti-Poverty Organization (Comment # 398) Ontario Federation of Labour (Comment # 432) Robert E. Babe (Comment # 162) Telecommunications Workers Union (Comment # 227) Telecommunities Canada (Comment # 294) Telus Corporation (Comment # 246) Although we do not necessarily support all the recommendations in these comments, we feel that all warrant important weight and consideration. Among the general recommendations made by these organizations and others, we wish to emphasize our support for some in particular. We support those recommendations that: - Call for a Royal Commission to consider a complete overhaul and renewal of the related Acts. - Argue in favour of a single-wire system as the most efficient and effective deployment of an national information/communication infrastructure. - Support the predominance of the common carrier and non-discriminatory access provisions of the Telecommunications Act in the regulation of new media. - Argue in favour of full and free public access to all crown copyright material. - Support the government's call for the right to go broke," (Comment # 429) in the case of inefficient or redundant industries. - Suggest the need for and make recommendations for new ways of promoting Canadian culture, specifically those which take such promotion out of the hands of distributors. - Emphasize the need to protect personal information prior to further development of commercial or government initiatives. 6. Conclusion - Defining the Public's Interest Many arguments have been made in the comments submitted to these proceedings which support various conceptualizations of the public's interests. The growth of industry, continued regulation, de-regulation, competition between corporations, and the creation of public utilities represent just a sample of the contradictory arguments presented. We suggest that there is a more fundamental level of public interest which should be asserted and which offers some clear policy choices. The primary interest of the Canadian public is the continued existence of a public. Communication is a precondition to the constitution of a public. If our ability to communicate with each other is degraded in any way, our interests will have suffered. The issues before the Commission have the potential to degrade the ability of Canadians to communicate with each other. The assertion of a competitive broadcasting model as a framework for current and emerging media will have such an effect. Examples in the United States have clearly shown that competitive environments result in the red-lining of portions of the population. Communication Food-stamp programs which require means tests, administered in some cases by telephone companies, will not serve to fulfil this requirement, as demonstrated south of the border. Canada must work toward 100% access to basic communication infrastructure (eg. the telephone and in the future the information highway). Imposing the broadcasting model on the new media could subject the communication of the Canadian people to the filters and censorship of private corporations, governments, and moralistic adjudicators. This can not be allowed to happen. The technologies already in use and those yet to be developed have the potential to make personal communication indistinguishable from what is now considered broadcasting content. We cannot allow every Canadian to be considered a broadcaster and therefore have their speech subject to the restrictions of a public broadcasting system. Rather we must change the way we conceive of and treat broadcasting. Also in the public's interest is an honest discussion of the issues and concerns involved. We have already discussed our concern with the current process and re-state our support for a Royal Commission to review and consider these issues. In addition, we urge the Commission to examine the assumptions glossed over by the rhetoric of many of the submissions. The language of technological determinism, which suggests that technology offers us no choice, economic determinism, which finds supposedly uncontrollable global forces dictating our policies, and nationalist rhetoric must be recognized as disguised self-interest and disregarded. One common example of this is the frequent assertion that investment in these new technologies can increase employment. On the contrary, technologies of automation in our value-adding economy de-skill and reduce employment. Finally, we urge the Commission to invite all the public interest advocates to the hearing so that the process will represent an attempt at fair representation. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shawn W. Yerxa Ottawa, Canada swyerxa@ccs.carleton.ca -----------------------------------------------------------------------------