International Trade committee  I'm glad you liked the five I started with. I think those are the kinds of issues, given that we are actively renegotiating NAFTA and negotiating TPP 11, that are very much current. Taking the perspective that e-commerce is somehow a threat and that those jobs can leave isn't to view e-commerce with the fulsome kind of potential that it has.

International Trade committee  I'll start by noting that there's no single solution, and you're right to highlight it as an issue. I mentioned in my opening remarks the importance of trust, and I highlighted that in the context of the anti-spam legislation. It is worth emphasizing that the anti-spam legislation isn't just about dealing with fraudulent spam.

International Trade committee  There's a reason that I started the five recommendations with access, because I really do think it is the foundational issue that you have to address. You are right to note that there is not a quality of access today, and access even where it is available in many places remains expensive, which creates, in a sense, two sets of digital divides in Canada.

International Trade committee  I think Canadian privacy law largely meets global standards, although we've started to see the European Union in particular, through something known as the GDPR, elevate those standards. I think we're going to rapidly face some challenges if the EU starts digging into whether or not we continue to meet those standards.

International Trade committee  Mr. Simons has obviously made a strong case for why he thinks there's a problem. I'll say a couple of things. First off, I think there is an inevitability to sales taxes in the online environment, so with regard to this debate over Netflix sales tax, the notion that somehow there are a whole lot of people out there who are about to drop their Netflix subscriptions and go to something else strikes me as highly unlikely.

International Trade committee  I think we've done a good job domestically, generally speaking, in establishing e-commerce-related rules. We have fairly high standards when it comes to privacy. We have consumer protection rules that could still be improved, but we do fairly well. We have the anti-spam law that I made reference to as well.

International Trade committee  Thanks very much. Good afternoon. My name is Michael Geist. I'm a law professor at the University of Ottawa, where I hold the Canada research chair in Internet and e-commerce law. As always, I appear today in a personal capacity representing only my own views. While there are many Canadian e-commerce success stories, often started small—everything from e-commerce platforms such as Shopify to services such as Hootsuite and retailers such as Clearly Contacts—there are also, as we've just heard, many smaller businesses that use a combination of e-commerce, social media, and online platforms to raise awareness and foster customer loyalty.

Industry committee  No. The evidence we received was that it wasn't about who was doing the enforcing. It was about the penalties. It was clear if you took a look at some of the weak laws, say, in the United States, just like the CAN-SPAM act, fundamentally if you were a spamming organization, you just weren't all that fussed about the law, because there weren't really tough penalties behind it; whereas Australia put some real muscle behind it, and it changed the risk analysis that those organizations engaged in.

Industry committee  I'm going to pick up on that with one other point, and that's to say that we pay not just for that but also in terms of the spam we receive. I would disagree with respect to Mr. Messer's point that somehow it's the telecom providers or the ISPs that bear the cost. No. We bear the cost, and we all know about the problems we have with affordability of Internet access and the kinds of data charges we face.

Industry committee  I agree with Mr. Kardash on this. There are three agencies. I don't have any sense that the particular agencies themselves represent the problem at this point in time. Again hearkening back to when we were working on the report, we met with authorities from the United States and talked to various people who were involved in groups such as the one known as M3AAWG, which brings together people engaged in enforcement activities around the world.

Industry committee  I think we need to understand that the existence of the private right of action under the law is not an accident. We looked at other jurisdictions which had it, and then spoke to organizations that had used it and found it was effective. In the United States, where you see some of these actions, we spoke to organizations that had used the law, and they found that the misuse, sometimes of their domain or other sorts of spamming activities, declined after they brought those actions.

Industry committee  I want to pick up on that notion that back in 2004 we couldn't or wouldn't have predicted necessarily the rise of social media and some of these other technologies. I think that's true. In fact, the committee recognized that there was a rapid pace of change taking place. Ironically, based on the recommendations we are hearing today, we were urged to adopt as much of a technologically neutral approach as possible.

Industry committee  I agree with that. I agree with the premise of the question, and I think it's a question best posed to the enforcement agencies as to why they haven't targeted those—

Industry committee  My comment is twofold. One, I think the CRTC has failed to target, as I think you rightly point out, the remaining large spamming organizations. From my perspective, it's inexplicable, given that we know where they are. It was amazing when the law was being crafted and we had at least one large Canadian-based spammer who was openly blogging and laughing about it, and in a sense almost urging enforcement, and yet we haven't seen that.

Industry committee  I'm happy to tell you that as a task force we met with law enforcement regularly. It was a real challenge at the time in regard to convincing them that some of these issues rose to the level of deserving some of their attention and the use of their scarce resources. Years later, when we take a look at what we've seen, particularly in some of the malware cases, let's say, and some of the other major sorts of cases....