OpenSource

There's some big news this week that could affect the future of choice and affordability when it comes to your cell phones.

The story behind the first item I want to mention starts back in 2008, when big telecom company Shaw was able to acquire resources that the government had set aside for startups and small companies looking to create new cell phone options for Canadians.

Now, Shaw of course is one of Canada's biggest telecom companies, but they would technically have been new to the wireless market, so they were able to take advantage of the government's attempt to create choice.

But now it's five years later, and not only has Shaw failed to provide Canadians with a new cell phone service, they're taking the resources they got as a "new entrant" and they're selling them to Canada's biggest cell phone company -- Rogers.

The long and short: Big Telecom took control of assets that were promised to create new independent choices, and are using them to give Big Telecom more control.

As Canada gets tied in more and more tightly to the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, an industry lobby group called the International Intellectual Property Alliance (or IIPA) is pressuring the U.S. to pressure Canada to tighten Internet restrictions.

According to law expert Michael Geist, their plain-language demand is for Canada to adopt "a termination system that would cut off Internet access for subscribers accused of infringement" – very obviously, overzealously protecting Big Media's assets to the detriment of citizens.

The IIPA also wants Canada to remove our cap on how much a person can be fined if they break copyright (and we're talking about non-commercial infringement here, which often falls into the category of 'everyday uses of the Internet'). With our digital economy lagging, this just isn't something Canada Internet users can afford.

Hi I'm Lindsey and this is your Weekly News Update from OpenMedia.

Just over a month ago, we asked you for your help. The StopTheTrap.net petition was gaining some pretty incredible momentum, and we had just printed and hand-delivered the over ninety-thousand names to key TPP negotiators in San Diego, California.

But industry lobbyists were—and still are—pushing really hard to keep all of their anti-Internet restrictions in the agreement, and we knew we would have to build out the structure of the pro-Internet movement in order to win.

Now, thanks to many of you who chipped in with a donation, we have an online hub ready.

Our two-step plan to grow our numbers and amplify our voices was to (1) launch a social media-infused website that rallies citizens around the world, and (2) to develop online tools to pressure leaders to reveal the secret drafts of the TPP.

Today I am pleased to announce for the very first time that openmedianow.net is ready. You built it, it's yours, go check it out.

Hi I'm Lindsey and this is your Weekly News Update from OpenMedia.ca.

Today I want to talk a little more about big telecom company Bell's proposed takeover of Astral Media. If you caught last week's update, you know that Reilly talked about this in the context of Bell trying to get out of its public interest obligations. But now I want to talk a little more about the long-term implications of this merger: this is Canada's most powerful communications conglomerate potentially gaining control over another key content provider.

Canada already has some of the highest levels of media concentration in the industrialized world—more than twice that of the U.S.-- which means that a lot of what we watch or listen to (roughly seventy-eight percent of the television market, for example) is owned by fewer Big Telecom companies than I have fingers on one hand.

Obviously this is a problem if you care about diversity of voices. And slightly less obviously, if you care about the open Internet.