Tech Won't Save Us - Competition Won’t Fix Canada’s Telecom Woes w/ Fenwick McKelvey

Episode Date: August 4, 2022

Paris Marx is joined by Fenwick McKelvey to discuss the massive outage at Rogers, why it’s challenging the narrative that more competition will fix Canada’s telecom sector, and the need for better regulation and even public ownership.Fenwick McKelvey is the author of Internet Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed. He’s also an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University and a director of Machine Agencies at the Milieu Institute. Follow Fenwick on Twitter at @mckelveyf.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Fenwick spoke to CBC about the Rogers outage and previously spoke to Daniel Joseph about changing the way we think about media platforms in Canada.Paris has previously argued for telecom nationalization in Canada and has written about the history of Canadian telecom.After the outage, Canadian innovation minister François-Philippe Champagne forced telcos to come up with a new agreement on several key areas of emergency cooperation.The Competition Bureau is objecting to a proposed merger between Rogers and Shaw.Last year, the Rogers family was engaged in a protracted feud that affected management of the company.ZeD was an “open-source television” series aired by Canada’s public broadcaster from 2002 to 2006.Support the show

I think in particular what the outage emphasizes is the paradigm of what we're going to have competitors and they're going to have different networks and it's going to create resilience in the network. It didn't work. It didn't happen. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, or as I've been saying with this series, Tech Won't Save Canada. Last month, I launched the Canadian bonus series that has some specific conversations about tech in Canada, because that's where I'm from and I really care about these issues. But I probably should have thought about this a little bit more because summer came right after it.

And to be quite honest, I don't really want to do two episodes a week during the summer because I'm trying to take it a little bit easy. So here's the plan. For July and August, the Canadian episodes are going to be regular weekly episodes. Then in September, I'm going to go back to making those a bonus episode. But I think that this episode is going to be very interesting and applicable to many people outside of Canada, as these conversations will be anyway. This week, my guest is Fenwick McKelvey. Fenwick is the author of Internet Daemons, Digital Communications Possessed, and an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. He's also the director of machine agencies at the Milieu Institute. You might have heard in the news that

on July 8th, Rogers, which is one of the major telecom networks in Canada, went down for basically the whole day. And as a result of that, people not only lost their home phone service, their cable, their internet, but our debit payment system went down across the country. 911, which is the emergency number, was not accessible for many Rogers customers. And there were many other consequences that came of that outage. It really put a spotlight on how concentrated the Canadian telecom sector is and how these companies do not often serve the public interest, and that the government has neglected its role as a regulator of these services for far too long to allow them

to act in service of their own profits and their shareholders' wealth, but not the public good. And hopefully, this outage is finally going to change that. So in this conversation, Fenwick and I talk about the outage and talk about the Canadian telecom sector, but we also talk about what the solutions to these problems might look like. For a long time in Canada, the debate has been around competition, that we need more competition in the telecom sector and that that is going to solve these problems. pushed by our last conservative government under the leadership of Stephen Harper. And then that took hold as a key part of the telecom policy debate. However, in this conversation, we challenge that narrative. And we say that there may be some room for competition in service delivery, but ultimately, telecom is a natural monopoly. And that means that the government has an important role to play to ensuring those networks serve the public good and allow Canadians to access what are essential services. And if anything is going to come of this outage, it's the recognition that the government needs to play a bigger role in telecommunications

in Canada to ensure that people have access to these essential services wherever they are in the country and they're not gouged by these major telecom giants. I was so, so happy to have Fenwick on the show. I think that this is a fantastic conversation and the kind of conversation that you might not hear in other places about the telecom industry in Canada. And so that made me especially happy to have Fenwick on the show to discuss it. This Canadian series is made in partnership with Passage, which is a left-wing publication in Canada. They publish a ton of fantastic articles and analysis on the political situation in Canada. And in making this series,

I thought it made total sense to partner with them to publish edited transcripts of these conversations after they're done to reach an even broader Canadian audience. Now, if you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week and to making these Canadian episodes every month, you can join supporters like Vesemati from Ulu, Finland, and Bruna in Berlin by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and becoming

a supporter. Thanks for listening and enjoy this week's conversation. Fenwick, welcome to TechWontSaveUs. Paris, it's totally great to be here. I'm really excited to chat with you. There was this outage recently in Canada that even people outside of Canada may have noticed happened. One of our major telecom providers went down. But before we get into talking about that, the impacts of it, what we should learn from it, I wanted to start with more of a general overview of the state of the Canadian telecoms industry. Can you talk to us a bit about what the industry is like in Canada right now, including who the major players are and why they hold such a dominant position in the market? Yeah, Canada is an interesting example of a country that has had many different phases of telecommunication policy.

It really started out as a bit of a free-for-all with many different competing networks. And that gradually consolidated into an era of what we talk about as natural monopolies or a concentration in a few state-owned companies. And so there was, for generations, telephone companies that were provincially owned. So in my own home province of New Brunswick, we had MBTEL. And these were spread across Canada, coordinating in a part of a national network called the Stenton Alliance, which allowed for long-distance communications. And this is part of a national network called the Stenton Alliance, which allowed for long distance communications. This is part of the story of telecommunications is basically a decades long history of monopolies that were state owned or public utilities.

And that beginning in the 70s and with a turn towards what we now refer to as regulatory liberalism and neoliberalism, there's a privatization and a conversion or a privatization of these companies. And so the Canadian telecommunications system really is still going through that process of privatization. And where we've seen in the beginning of the 80s, these companies, public utilities being sold off, and then gradually they've been reacquired into a few different large national monopolies. And because of the Canadian market, these are fairly protected companies. So there's conditions around their ownership and that the split is roughly one between just two players usually per province. And so you have a split

between the large telephone legacy companies and the large cable legacy companies. So where I'm now in Jojoke or Montreal, we have Bell, which is the telephone company competing with Videotron, which is our cable company. And this is part of the split and there's some smaller players. And in Ontario where Red Friday took place or the big Rogers outage took place, you have a real divide between Bell and Rogers, and there's still some different players, but really that's the even split across Canada is that we have roughly five major companies across Canada, and they're usually segregated to being in select markets. So you're not seeing all five companies competing in the same place. And so

that's an important part of it is we talk, there's a big number of telecommunications companies, but they're unevenly competing when it comes to these services that they're providing across the country, and in some cases, actually collaborating and sharing networks. Yeah, I think that's a really good introduction for people to give them an idea of, you know, the state of the industry. And I would just add to it by picking up on a few of the points that you made there. Firstly, that it is interesting to see the privatization of these public telecom companies and how they eventually become part of these monopolies or part of this oligopoly, I guess is better to say, in particular in Manitoba, where they nationalized part of the Bell system in the early 1900s. Then that was privatized in the 90s,

I believe it was. And now, as of I think it was 2007, is part of Bell once again. And TELUS, which is one of our other major telecom companies, mainly based out West, but has a national presence, particularly with mobile phone or cell phone service, that used to be Alberta's public telecom company and BC's kind of private monopoly telecom company that merged together along with some others over time. And so I think it's just really interesting to see how that plays out. And just for the listeners, you know, Rogers is one of those major cable companies that you were talking about. Bell is kind of the legacy telephone company that had a real dominant position within Canada for a long

time. Telus is also one of those major players, as I said. And we also have Shaw, which is mainly in the Western part of Canada. Videotron, which is in Quebec. Eastlink, which is here on the East Coast where I am. And I'll say, you said that the outage was mainly an Ontario thing, though not exclusively with Rogers. Here in Newfoundland and Labrador, we also didn't experience it so much, you know, other than the broader effects of it, because Rogers isn't a big player here. Yeah, I just wanted to emphasize that one I think is important to realize is just the legacy and the history of these networks. And part of these histories being really caught up in Canada as a settler colonial state. And so the possibility of these networks to be built isn't something that's accidental or easy to do. And for Bell's own relationship, it really goes back to the railroad. And this is

the railroad that, you know, in my learning and knowing, it's a railroad that was built largely as John A. MacDonald knew of the starvation that was taking place and the people of the plains, and using that as leverage to appropriate territory, in part to build the railroad. And those same rights of way that the railway run on are now being used for fiber backbone. So it's important to say that when we talk about telecommunications infrastructure, we're not talking about stuff that springs up overnight. You know, this stuff has history and it has dependencies and legacies. And I think in many ways, when we're talking about telecommunications in Canada, we're talking about the settler colonial project of Canada, which has systematically dispossessed certain people from their land

and also from being connected. And a lot of the digital divides that exist are in part because of where the railroad didn't go and who isn't connected. And I think that's part of when we talk about these companies, that these companies have benefited from some of the work of the state to create these rights and ways, and in many cases, give access to, if not the infrastructure, at least the capacity of building out these networks. Yeah, that's such an essential point. And I'm so happy that you made it. You know, one of the things that I think the listeners will recognize that we do a lot on the show is talk a lot about the history of various technologies and infrastructures that are involved with,

you know, the internet and all these things that we're talking about. So I'm really happy that you made that point and that you brought it into the conversation. Now, I want to move to the Rogers outage. On July 8th, the Rogers network went down for virtually the whole day, and that had huge impacts across Canadian society. What was the effect of that outage and what did it reveal about the industry? Well, I think there's two ways to approach the outage. First is like what technically happened and what were the consequences of that? And then what does that reveal as a broader illustration of the telecommunications market? And what Rogers says is that three distribution routers in its core network failed or started to misbehave.

A filter was removed that started propagating the wrong addresses to its core network and or started to misbehave. A filter was removed that started propagating the wrong addresses to its core network and it crashed. Now, what's interesting is that that core network was essential for many, many different services. And so it's helpful to list all of these services that were affected from Rogers. So what went down was Rogers Wireless, Rogers Home Internet, Rogers Home Phone System, Rogers Banking Systems in part. It's radio stations, parts of its omni-channel distribution systems.

It's provisions of government services that provides to the government. The Interact Banking System that we use every day to make payments. And so many people, you know, in Montreal, I was down at the Jazz Fest and you couldn't pay by debit. You had to pay by credit card and there's signs up. So, you know, then you also had that this is something that affected certain 911 services

as well as critical infrastructure providers. So here you are talking about this entirety of different companies that are being affected. So one critical question is how is it that Rogers Network was designed and built such that everything, including what, as I understand it, both critical infrastructure and everyday home services could all be unilaterally affected by this one crash of these routers, which raises really interesting questions about their network design. What are the decisions being made? And I think some questions about the kind of corporate

governance taking place at the company, which we'd be happy to touch upon. The second issue is just one of kind of concentration. And we talk about this in the abstract where market concentration is how much these companies own. But I think it's important for folks at home to think about one of the programs that Rogers, as well as every other telecommunications, tries to encourage is bundling. So you don't get just your cell phone, you get your home phone, you get your television, maybe security. And this is this bundling. And the bundling system is encouraging you to go to one provider. And really what becomes an indication is just how many services are kind of controlled by one company. And on top of that, in Toronto, the weekend concert was canceled because Rogers, which

owns what I would always call the Sky Dome, but now it's called the Rogers Dome, whatever it is, also crashed. And so it's just a cascading reminder of just all the influence this one company has over essential services. And that's, I think, a really interesting part of the reaction as someone who studied telecommunications for a long time. This outage, this crisis has really caused reactions. I was in line the other day and people were joking about, you know, maybe having to use a credit card.

And it's really remarkable how this has turned, I think, an issue that's been really longstanding for those studying telecommunications into something that everybody now can relate to, which has really been an interesting shift. Yeah, I think that's such an important point. And there's a few things that I want to pick up there, but I don't have this in my questions, but it came back to me as you were talking about the bundling. And one of the responses that I saw in the media, even as the Rogers outage was ongoing, was how Canadians should be diversifying their services, how they should be having their cell phone from one company and their cable or internet services from another company. And my reaction to that was to think that that was really individualizing a problem that, you know, is so much far beyond

the individual Canadian. Like, should a Canadian have to worry about, you know, whether their cell phone service is with Bell and their cable internet is with Rogers or what company they're getting that from. And does that individualize the problem in a way that is really counterproductive and doesn't really get to the core of what the problem is there? Should that expectation really exist for people to diversify services,

like say Interact or something like that, when they're just an individual? Yeah, I think often, and I think it's one of the challenges when we're talking about regulatory reform or solutions, is the idea it's an individual problem to be solved. And that, you know, the idea is, well, you just weren't prepared enough

and that you really faced a lot of these choices. Because I think one of the fallacies is that, oh, well, what would be really simple is just going somewhere else. And that becomes really challenging. And I think what really cuts to this is that, you know, I've been in studying telecommunications long enough. I know and I remember the fights over being able to unlock your phone. It used to be that you couldn't get a phone to swap SIM cards. That was prohibited. There's concerns about fraud. It was real pushback.

You had to pay to unlock your phone. And the contingency plan being put forward was you just swap your SIM cards, which is, I think, also quite ridiculous if you're talking about, you know, who's able to switch your SIM card. And if this is four o'clock in the morning when the network goes out, I mean, I would be fumbling at the best of times to swap SIM cards. I think it would be a lot to ask anybody else. I mean, maybe we need to get there, but I think it's important to remember that even the ability or the right to swap a SIM card was something that was hard fought over, and it was only the result of the Canadian Radio, Television, and Telecommunications Commission, the CRTC, to put in a wireless code of conduct to set obligations for carriers.

And that's, I think, a really important point here is we're seeing whether or not something like a wireless code of conduct or service standards or certain rights could actually be beneficial here. Because in many ways, the even possibility that you'd be able to swap services depends upon government regulation to put in place the fact that you could buy and have an unlocked phone to swap SIM cards. I was actually working in telecom when those changes came into place. So it was interesting to watch it from that side of the thing, something that people should have been able to do forever anyway, but obviously it was restricted because that benefited the companies to ensure that could happen. I want to move on to another

point. And this is, I guess, a broader question that, you know, kind of comes out when we're talking about the concentration in the industry, right? Since at least the days that Stephen Harper's conservative government tried to bring Verizon to Canada, the focus of telecom policy has been on competition and the lack thereof in the Canadian market. I've long seen that as a market solution to what is not inherently a market problem, given that network infrastructure often operates more like a natural monopoly or oligopoly, you know, as you're talking about, you know, maybe a telephone company and a cable company are dominating, for example. Do you think that the Rogers outage will finally reset that policy debate and allow us to look more at regulatory issues in that side of the debate rather than

simply competition? And is there enough competition? Well, I think this is precisely the contradiction that belies, I think, a lot of interest in telecommunications and, I think, more broadly, platform governance, where these companies are profitable and seem to be profitable because of the natural monopoly and the buy-in and lock-in powers that they have. And so we see them as they're marketized in such ways to know that, well, they have this advantage and they can extract what becomes kind of monopoly power, or at least the kind of lock-in network effects power. And yet, at the same time, there's this perception that the solution for this is to let the market allow for competition, which is going to bring about something that's entirely contradictory to this process of why

these companies are profitable in the first place, is they do have network effects. And the idea that you're going to create competing networks, and I think competing networks that are going to be able to create or foster this competition, I think hasn't proven true. And in many ways, you could describe the 20 or 30-year history of Canadian telecommunications policy as a decades-long effort to maintain the fallacy of market competition into the telecommunications sector. I think what's really important for listeners to remember is Canada's different, and Canada still has common carriage rules, which really provide special treatment,

and I think treat telecommunications companies as critical infrastructure subject to greater regulation. And we can talk about whether that regulation is effective or not, but I think really some of these principles, common carriage, or what listeners might understand better is network neutrality, and there's some nuances there, but really this idea that these companies have this important power that needs to be taken

seriously is something that is, I think, an important part of the regulatory tradition in Canada. And I would hope, I think this points to this opportunity for renewal. And one of the parts that's been surprising for me is the conversation widening immediately after the Rogers conversation. I teach media policy almost every year, media policy in Canada. And this year, I took a break from telecommunications policy because I found it, frankly, too depressing. And this is something which, to me, is at least interesting. And seeing what has been a fairly narrow conversation of really thinking only about competition and the idea that you're going to have a fourth carrier come in

that's going to fix these problems and really kind of wanting it out and to have a conversation about maybe a public utility or maybe there's better public access to these networks is something that's frankly exciting because I don't exactly know what the right answer is, but I've really been, I think, frustrated by how the scope of our policy conversations is narrowed and narrowed, particularly focused on this kind of one point of competition as a cure-all because Verizon never came. And I think the evidence suggests that Verizon never would have come because it was too costly and it wasn't something to do with regulatory impediments. It was the fact that if you looked at the market and the cost to get into it, it just

wasn't worth the time and the investment to really become a carrier. And I think that that's an important lesson to this possibility of competition occurring. Yeah, I think you've really nailed it. And I think that makes a ton of sense. You know, looking at it from my perspective, I often feel like the kind of competition narrative and the focus on competition ignores the distinction between infrastructure and service delivery, right? And sure, you can have competition on service delivery if you have the right regulatory framework in place around mobile virtual network

operators and wholesale rates and various things like that. But ultimately, the infrastructure is going to remain this natural monopoly. And that is where these dominant players, you know, get their power, so to speak. And that power allows them to disrupt the regulations that would allow the competition on the service delivery side anyway, by ensuring that they continue to have that power. And you're not going to have the kind of competition that is often predicted when people talk about a fourth carrier on the infrastructure side, because the cost of building out another network would just be so costly. And I think there's really important conversations that are happening about reforms to the Competition

Act. And I think it's strange in this moment we're having where traditionally the CRTC has been one that has tried to nuance. And as much as I complain about the CRTC, I also really care about it as an institution. And it's interesting to see the shift and a more potentially activist competition bureau taking some reform. So I don't mean to belay or critique competition in general, but I think in particular, I think you're right, is that it's helpful to say that the solutions that we have and the ways we're affording the telecommunications sector require a different discussion. And I think

the long history of public utilities and I think community-owned networking suggests that there's different ways of approaching this. And I think there's a spectrum of options that could be out there from what you were talking about, MVNOs or more service-based competitions where you have a public wholesaler and service-based competitors to something more like a public access networks or community access networks. And I think that that's something to acknowledge that we do have in Canada and there are a diverse use, but it's one that I don't think we emphasize enough and certainly emphasize the potential solution or direction of this. And that's a hopeful change. Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. And you can see how competition might be necessary in certain sectors, but that doesn't mean that every single sector is going to

benefit from competition or the narrative of competition, right? You know, as you're saying, and as this debate around competition policy kind of heats up in Canada. I want to go back to the outage. In the days after the Rogers outage happened, industry minister François-Philippe Champagne met with the telecom executives and gave them 60 days to make an agreement on emergency roaming, mutual assistance during outages, and a better emergency communications plan. The telecom regulator, the CRTC, as you've been talking about, also said it was going to investigate and would have recommendations of its own. What do you make of the government's response to the outage, and do you think it goes far enough? I think that it really points to what's happened over the liberal mandate is the real deference to these larger

telecommunications companies. And I think that a lot of our response to the pandemic and how we're rolling out kind of bridging this digital divide has been through incentivizing and funding these companies to build, you know, improve the networks, at least in Quebec, Videotron offering, you know, being the sole provider of the new broadband access program. So I think in some ways that really, to me, points to a kind of an omega point, for lack of a better word, of it's been years in the making and concerns about, you know, many aspects of kind of oversight of this industry and whether the government has done enough to keep these companies in check. And particularly its appointment of, you know, Ian Scott as chair of

the CRTC, I think has raised some real concerns about how seriously it's taking this file. I think, importantly, it has done some limited steps about affordability. But to me, it's hard to see how there's going to be a way forward because there really has been this reliance on these market forces as a solution to Canadians' digital divide needs. And so in that sense, I'm slightly pessimistic about being a response. And I think in particular, what the outage emphasizes is the paradigm of what we're going to have competitors and they're going to have different networks and it's going to create resilience in the network. It didn't work. It didn't happen. And apparently, Rogers' own guidelines is they had SIM cards from other networks they plugged into their phones to switch and get on a new network. And so it speaks

to, in some part, this idea that these networks would work together. And the fact that they didn't when it was probably one of the main kind of mission critical things for them to do really speaks, I think, to the fact that there's a lot of work to be done, I think, to improve how we're dealing with telecommunications policy in this country. And I think that, you know, frankly, it's as much a government thing as the companies. And the companies are ultimately accountable to their shareholders. I think really the kind of lack of a political will when you're talking about how we're treating these companies, even the treatment so far, I mean, you know, you're being pulled to testify before parliament.

These are kind of a largely symbolic gesture. Rogers could file most of its description of what happens in confidence, and we'll see how effective the CRTC is actually demanding accountability on this. And what's the next step? And I think there's a lot of pressure. And I think there's as much pressure on Rogers as there is on government to actually showcase and they can have a meaningful interaction. I think that's the worrisome part, is that if we're looking for solutions, we see actually that there's more of a fit between, I think, a market-based approach to telecommunications and the companies providing them. And so there's a kind of symmetry between government and these companies, which will lead to, I mean, what we've had for decades, you know, ineffectiveness and a continued fantasy about the possibility of competition. This is maybe a big question kind of building on that. But you talked earlier about how through the 80s and even into the 90s, you know, there was

this process of deregulation of telecommunications in Canada to kind of take down some of the restrictions that existed around, you know, mergers, acquisitions, other aspects of the telecoms industry and the privatization of public players that existed and their eventual kind of integration into this telecom oligopoly that exists. Do you think that the deregulation of telecoms was a mistake in hindsight? I think it hasn't proven what it's claimed to do, which is foster competition and seeing competitive marketplace. I think it's hard to talk about that because there's so many shifts that have taken place.

But I think shifting, say, from more of a cultural vantage point, it's been really interesting just how every subsequent new communication technologies have been increasingly private, individually private, I mean, in the sense that everybody has their own phone and their own plan and that everybody has their own internet, home internet account. And there's always been the possibility of having the community networks, Canada also had a community access program where the internet was in libraries and schools. And there's a more fulsome discussion of what does being connected and what would the

information superhighway, you know, to use a throwback term, what was talked about is the information superhighway, how would it roll out? And I think what really has evolved is that there's been a way that when we talk about our public communication infrastructure, largely the fate of that is decided by a few companies, domestic and international now. And that, I think, really winnows our imagination for these critical infrastructures. And so I think we're now at this particular inflection point where our mobile phones are equivalent to the telephone. And the telephone was treated as a universal service. There's questions about, like, I mean, frankly, right now, should you be paying tax on your mobile phone because it's an essential service? What

are the ways of increasing affordability immediately? But in that sense, I feel as though there's been this shift that's very obvious after the pandemic, where we all depend on the internet to do our everyday lives. It's critical infrastructure. And yet the way of imagining what this infrastructure is going to be is largely Roger's new super ignite internet connection. And I think that that to me is ultimately one of the ways I really see a kind of possibility of innovation, particularly innovation and connectivity being defined in fairly narrow terms. And I know that's a bit of an abstract answer, but I think that that's an important one to me because I want to emphasize a lot. I'm an old pirate from the internet. I mean, I was really interested in peer-to-peer networking,

many of these different ways of envisioning, thinking about what the internet could be. It was never intuitive to me that the internet would be your local Rogers connection that you wouldn't share. And I was living in Toronto where there's attempts to have wireless cooperatives, you know, shout out to the old wireless nomad. And I think Ilsan Field here in Montreal, you know, these are ways that we're imagining and that becomes harder and harder to do. And I think that that's really something that I think is particularly worrisome. And I think even more so because what happened here is the complexity of this technology is seen to be so much more advanced that it seems like another very probable outcome of this is that we're going to have to delegate

more and more to these critical security issues to experts away from public purview. I want to pick up on what you said about the pandemic in just a second, but this probably overlaps a bit with what you were just saying. But I wonder, you know, obviously telephone and television and even cable emerged in these moments where I guess there was a greater recognition that the government had a role to play in ensuring that telecommunication services serve some kind of a public purpose, right? But then the internet emerges in this really neoliberal moment where the idea is that the government needs to largely have a hands-off

and let the internet kind of develop and let these private companies define what the internet is going to be and how it's going to work. Do you think that that shapes how we think about the internet and the role of telecommunications in society today in a negative way? Yeah, and this is something I say with, you know, some begrudges to my past naivete, but I think it's Valley was largely through decades prior subsidization of this work. And I think also innovations that happened elsewhere and America's own hegemonic influence of interfering or steering the shaping of what became the international networking protocols. And so, yeah, I think that it's important then to kind of emphasize that parts of the way the internet evolved was really closely connected with this idea of creating markets and marketization.

And really, I think that's quite baked in to core internet technologies in general. So on a bit of a tangent, I always think of like internet advertising as a great example of like, what is an idealized neoliberal marketplace where it's total tire fire, there's a million different providers

that are all doing these little microtransactions, these strange markets that are being designed that potentially the market engineers have an advantage of, but no one has enough vantage points to know what's going on. And I think that's partially by design. Now what we see somewhat in Canada is because of the legacy of these infrastructures, it's not idealized competition. I think what in some ways is there's a gap is this idea that we're going to have competition and we're going to have this kind of open innovation and just the

structural nature of telecommunications companies. And so it's different to me a little bit because I think many of the ideas of how the internet works, the idea of internet competition that came associated with the internet really are at a step with the way that networks are built and rolled out and the way that many Canadians don't, if you're talking about smaller rural remote communities, there's not incentive to build out multiple networks here. So there really is, I think, a tendency towards natural monopolies in this case. And so, yeah, I think part of that is that rhetoric and part of it is that is going. I think the other thing is that Rogers going out, it's just not about the internet. Rogers is a company that owns many different things. And we've also encouraged

vertical integration of companies so that they're not just providing telecommunications or networking, but all sorts of things. I always give the example of the Blue Jays. No one in my classes cares, but I lived in Toronto and still have that legacy of like being a Jays fan. But like, if you think about the Blue Jays, it's like the team, the stadium, the television network, the radio network, the internet service, and the phone are all could potentially be owned by the same company. And so if there is a point of that, it's to say it's, there's a kind of neoliberalism in one sense, but adjacent to that is the idea of kind of governments being hands off and that kind of regulatory liberalism. And, you know, that's slightly, you know, they're kind

of caught together. But I think it's that latter one, which really what we see going on here is that there's been an exception or conventional wisdom that these companies can get bigger and buy bigger things, and that's going to work out. And it hasn't in the past. And there's the Bell Astral merger and that going and failing and these questions about being content providers. And Rogers, I think, has, I think, partially where Rogers is in a bind to how much money they owe the NHL to some degree. And these gets into these really interesting, weird discussions. What are the consequences of letting these companies diversify in potentially different

directions where their interests might be competing? Now, really, an ultimate question for me is that is the final outcome of this is was this network failure, the fact that all core activities were running through the same infrastructure was that the result of like network efficiency or was that actually good network design i think that's a question that still hasn't been answered and that could be a very direct answer to what's this kind of implication of neoliberalism is that the manager of the networks was being designed in such a way that resiliency and 100% uptime was maybe a secondary concern to the fact that you could lower the network operation costs compared to so that you're bringing down the cost and maybe automation and trying

to automate, I think, arguably workers that are running these networks and shout out to them for getting the network back on so quickly. That's, I think, an important way we're saying, well, that could be an outcome of regulatory liberalism, neoliberalism, where we see the market steering how these networks are being built differently than, say, as a public good. That's so fascinating. And it brings to mind how one of the things that the Rogers CEO said when he was at the committee hearing the other day was that one of the things they were going to do with the network was to try to bring in more AI to like, you know, manage the network

or whatever. I want to build on that answer you gave and ask, you were saying during the pandemic, it became undeniably clear that telecom services are essential as if we didn't, you know, know that before. And there are too many barriers to access from poor connections in parts of the country to high prices that Canadians pay, some of the highest in the world for access to telecom services. Instead of greater competition, is it time to learn from the historical approach that you've been talking about to telecommunications and look at treating it as a public utility with the proper regulation in place or even even making the telecom companies, or at least their infrastructure, part of a crown corporation like we still have in Saskatchewan with SaskTel? Well, I think it really pushes towards that being further on the table. I want to kind of emphasize that we do have community-owned networks and community approaches

to telecom internet in Canada already. And I think it's really important, my own story, I learned a lot about this from Cree communities in Northern Ontario. So K-Net was really important for me to think about how the internet could be built. And that was something that was largely community owned, delivered in part through the collaborations with Bell, but you're talking about a network that was meeting community needs and accountability to the council. So in one sense, we've really had innovation, to me, quite directly in Canada with Indigenous communities. And this is great work being done by the First Mile Connectivity Consortium, Dr. Rob McMahon, as well as Susan O'Donnell and the late Brian Beaton. May he rest in peace. As all people who, you know, I think helped me think about and really be reminded that when we're

talking about the internet already in Canada, many communities that have not had access and aren't in major urban centers have already turned to community, you know, public outcomes and answers. So it's not as though that shouldn't be on the table. I think it should be championed as a particular direction. Because I think the next step is like, you know, as much as we want to talk about a big national thing in some of these connections, is it opportunities for more municipal wireless

or more community or provincial options that could be on the table? I think there's a number of different directions that could be coming up here. And that also then I think gets at, you know, where do you want to incentivize change

and what's going to take place here? And for the wireless market, is it trying to reduce the cost and improve affordability? And I think affordability quite directly is not through competition, but trying to emphasize affordability or making sure that you have to offer, say, mandatory rates or packages, which Ben Klass and Dwayne Winstead have really showed that that security hasn't been effective in doing that, but there's one key pressure point. Then you're also talking about critical questions about internet peering and the kind of built infrastructure of the internet and whether there's enough transparency. And the Canadian Internet Registration Authority has really tried to build out Canada's IXP network, which I think was a

really important part of where are potential public points and public infrastructure for the internet. So I'm just kind of throwing out some different examples here. But yeah, I mean, there's a whole stack, and this is for lack of a better word, of places where we could start thinking about innovation and public-owned, community-owned innovation in what we call the internet. And that's something which we haven't advanced very far. And I think often, you know, my worry is that the organizations that we do have, particularly the CBC, aren't that imaginative in themselves to really allow for this. And so I think one of the things that I hope, and this is something maybe listeners think

about, is how to, you know, advocate and work towards that. And the thing I'd stress is it's not building another mesh network, which is something that I was totally suckered on for years, but it's really about, I think, pushing for, you know, I think state or community action and for lack of a better other direction. But I really think, you know, you're talking about, you know, infrastructure that really requires institutions to create. And it's like, how do you either leverage or lobby the existing institutions we have now to kind of work better in the public interest or trying to think more strategically, but what does it mean to create the kind of organizations that would allow these networks to exist? And that to me, yeah, I think in some ways

I'm hopeful about. And I think a lot of the pushes that we've already had, eligibility of communities in the broadband program, we might see more of a push here. And I think maybe also a more reticence to fund the same companies to do these community initiatives. So many important points there, even though, you know, as you said, you were kind of grabbing a grab bag of issues there. But I think it's really important to think about it, right? Well, I think that's the challenge of the Rogers outage.

And like what I find really hard to talk about is you're talking about wireless, home phone, internet connection. And there's so many different layers and nuances. They're all bundled together. And part of it is this is this convergence argument. So how do you talk about convergence? And I think we're at a stage where there is some way of talking about divergence now. What are the ways of talking about important structural separations as a first step?

And then where are the ways of public possibilities? We're not even getting into the internet itself, which I think social media in many ways built on and leveraged these ideas and myths of public media, particularly Zed TV, which Canada's CBC was really behind about thinking about being something of YouTube before YouTube. So, I mean, when we talk about public utilities and public alternatives, the problem is that it runs the whole spectrum from the core of the internet to the services you use every day. And if you're a creator relying on Patreon or Etsy, you know, there's lots of evidence of how difficult those companies can be worked with and working against particularly creators' interests. And yeah, I think there's lots of opportunities for more public nonprofit

or community-owned organizations to make an intervention. And so I think in that sense, if there's anything, hopefully this gets people excited and motivated to do that work necessary. I love that. And I would just say, you know, on your point about community networks and public networks and public solutions, like it's always felt weird to me that when we talk about telecom, there's this discussion that, you know, we should have all these options to choose from for for Internet and mobile service and all these sorts of things. And I think like in my province and much of Canada, as far as I'm aware, like we have a history of public power delivery where when you move into somewhere new, you just call

up the public utility and they switch the power on. And like you don't need to think about where it's coming from or the different options that are available for power. And it just always like occurred to me, like, why shouldn't telecom be that way? If it's an essential service as well, why shouldn't we just have a public provider that gives us our telecom services instead of, you know, having all of these supposed options that are still reliant on the same networks anyway? And the pressure to sell a product, to sell a new high-speed internet project, I think

really creates real inequities. And it's something that, this is my obligatory plug for the book Internet Demons, but one of the things I wanted to, I talk about in the book, I think it's important, is that there's a class system that gets built into this, right? Where there's those who can afford high speed and those are stuck with slow internet. And they only work because there is fast and there is a slow. That privilege is something that is doled out because of the fact that there's those who are like, there's the optimized and the disoptimized. And that's, I think, something that really, if you're thinking about your home internet, like what your plan is, how much you're paying for, what's your access.

I mean, in many ways, the internet would be simpler were it that there was one or two speeds and that there was less complexity about how these plans are being offered and what's in those plans or not. And I think that that really points to how effective what's going on here is this idea or need to create products and differentiated products, ultimately something which is leading to an Internet that's easy to design for and an Internet that is inclusive. And I think that there's real issues that, to me, this kind of very idea of internet speed is so closely tied up with the need to create privilege and luxury, which you can sell, you know, largely through creating those that are on the budget internet. And I think that that's really something that is at the core, but hard to explain about what have

been some of the consequences, how we've treated the treated the internet and why when we talk about a public utility there's a lot being discussed there and part of that change is not just you know management but it's also cultural change and what we think about when we talk about coordinate infrastructure because yeah this is the end of the day i mean who cares you know you don't know no one's complaining about how fast they're in it they just want it to work you know your zoom cuts out not. And I think there's been lots of movement that could have happened to ensure quality of service and essential access that could go down a total rabbit hole on latency. But those are things that, you know, we could talk more consciously about and talking about, you know, what would be the desires or what would be the goals that we have?

And whether it's feasible or not, I like this idea that you at least are opening up these conversations about really what I think is a fundamentally critical problem for a society like people's living in what we call Canada to be dealing with the ways that we envision and build our communication infrastructure. Like that's an inherently political problem. And it's great to see people talking about it differently than we've done before. Yeah, it's so fascinating to hear you describe the internet speeds that way. It never really occurred to me. But like thinking back to when I did work in telecom, very few people actually knew what the difference of the different speeds were, they just wanted to know it was going to work well for them, and they'd be able to do what they wanted to do. And they had no real conception

between like, what this number meant versus that number number and whether that was going to make much of a difference. You know, as this outage has happened and as there has been discussion about what the consequences of that should be, Rogers is also in the process of buying Shaw, which is the fourth largest telecom company in Canada. The Competition Bureau already seems to have concerns about the merger, not to mention industry observers and the general public. Do you think the outage kills the merger once and for all? I think it's going to make it like nigh impossible to go through. I mean, there's been all kinds of terrible. I'm thinking about the Torstar merger, you know, in the newspapers where they like shuttered all the newspapers and I forget who they merge with. But yeah, I think we've had a very lax environment

when talking critically about Burgess. And this is really, the evidence is so strong. It's hard to imagine this happening. I mean, and I think it's also, you know, there's real governance questions at Rogers too. I mean, this is a CEO that ousted, you know, members of the board, members of the Rogers family were seen at Mar-a-Lago with pictures of the Trump family. You know, after the Elster, you know, his wife sent a cameo video with Brian Cox from Succession. Like, there's all kinds of bad public optics in here on top of, I think, clear evidence this is not in the interest of consumers. And what we're seeing, you know, really interestingly is language to actually demonstrate what are the risks. So when we're talking about, you know, really interestingly is language to actually demonstrate what are the risks.

So when we're talking about, you know, affordability or you're really pushing for this, you know, coordination issues, you're seeing, I think, not only a shift of why this is a bad idea, but having evidence to point to it being a bad idea. And so, you know, ultimately, I think that that's, you know, somewhat exciting, although it's still fairly concentrated. And I think, you know, what we're really clinging on to is just things from being really, really concentrating to being really, really, really concentrated. So it's also, I think it's important to remember the stakes are high, but also low in some ways, because there's so much more to be done that it's important to say that the merger being stopped was, I think, a first step to, I think, better telecommunications policy in Canada and better broadcasting policy, too, for that matter. Yeah, no, hopefully it does finally get cancelled after all this time.

It seems hard to imagine it going forward at this point. Like there would be public outrage, I think, if this was able to go through. Yeah, I think it looks politically bad, too. I mean, that's, I think, at the end of the day, one of the regrettable parts. If it does go through. Yeah, I think it looks politically bad, too. I mean, that's, I think, at the end of the day, one of the regrettable parts. If it does go through, it really, there seems to be a no-win situation for this happening because I think the political risks are so high and that the evidence on the table is that if Rogers built its network so that all functions in a region are going through one hub and that goes down, that really puts cold water on the idea that adding more customers to that same network design is going to actually be beneficial. I've really enjoyed this conversation that I think

has been both insightful and enlightening, but also kind of mind expanding in terms of the possibilities that telecommunications could take instead of not just being, you know, a debate about how much competition do we want, but actually, you know, what role should the government play in addressing these problems? And how can we make the telecommunications services that we all rely on better serve the public, better serve those of us who are actually relying on these things? But I want to close this conversation with, I guess, a broader question. You know, we've discussed many aspects of telecommunications and what has happened recently with this outage, but are there particular regulations or developments that you'd like to see in the telecom sector that we haven't discussed in this conversation yet? Well, one thing that I wanted to

pick up on a little bit was your mention of artificial intelligence, because one of the things that I've been intervening in my recent work has been with my colleague and friend, Reggie Rajabushan, with Bell Canada using an AI system to block fraudulent calls. And I think for benign purposes, but the evidence that we're able to get and how we're able to participate in that hearing, I think, raises really compelling concerns about what the future telecommunications policy is going to be. Because were we to participate with full evidence, we would have had to sign a nondisclosure agreement. And that the way that the system could be explained in public, I don't think was adequate. Bell would dispute that. I really respect the fact that we disagree on this. But that I think, you know, a move towards artificial intelligence raises, I think, real critical questions about

democratic oversight of telecommunication systems and whether we actually can know and know enough about how they work to have proper accountability. And so that's something which I would like to see and like to see a way of talking about cybersecurity and security issues in a way that could reckon with this tendency towards privacy and confidentiality, which really run against, I think, public participation and the function of an institution like the CRTC. And that's a knot that I think really I'd like to see more discussion because I respect that there needs to be better security. But I think the way it's

being framed and how it's being discussed and the fact that it is, again, another luxury really raises some questions about how that industry could grow and change. And that the other issue, particularly when we're talking about AI and automation, is the fact that a lot of this is about trying to produce jobs. And so the idea of what the future of the internet, the future of the internet is often described as a zero touch networking or lights out operating centers or AI chatbots for your assistants. And so the other part of this pressure is that for folks who are looking on this podcast for these wider issues about artificial intelligence and some of these questions about tech. I mean, when we talk about automation, really, there's a key point of where that automation is taking place in networks. And is that coming at the expense of the workers? And I think the networking engineers and the gurus and all the kind of Unix heads showed out too that kept these networks running,

their jobs becoming more precarious. And I think that really kind of raises some questions. And that's to me, one of the outcomes I'd love to see or know about is that one of the things that happened in this outage was this a network out did that was because like there wasn't enough technicians or the technicians were overworked or what were the working conditions of those people running that network and were they properly supported and so that's when people talk about AI many different opinions but AI but really I see that as kind of a flag and one that I want people to demand more accountability about how this AI is being offered up as a solution. And then the last thing just to say is that, you know, I think telecommunications has been one where there's been, you know, a lot of setbacks. And I think that there's still a lot of potential. And I think the opportunities in Canada, particularly with a common carry tradition, really are important moments for advocacy and change. We have organizations like Open Media that have also

kind of pushing for this. And so it's something that you can be involved with and you can get engaged with. And that's opportunities to participate at the CRTC, in your local communities, talking to councils. And so it's one of the parts of those in Canada who have an ability of participating, you know, I really encourage you to do so because this is something that I think is important and it's something that can really benefit from more public concern. And it really is illuminating to me having nobody cared about these issues and being stuck feeling like I'm just insane or a crackpot that, and I still might be, but the fact that at least other people are concerned about this, you know, warms my heart. And I would really love to see, you know, more engagement around these issues. And

hopefully if anything comes out of this is that people take it seriously and people care about it enough to get involved and get engaged. I think those are some great points to end our conversation on. Fenwick, thank you so much for taking the time to walk us through all this and for all those insightful points. Paris, it's a delight to actually get into this and have a real conversation. I just want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. Fenwick McKelvey is the author of Internet Daemons, an associate professor at Concordia University, and the director of machine agencies at the Milieu Institute.

You can follow him on Twitter at at McKelvey F. You can follow me at at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. If you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.