Evidence of meeting #82 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was internet.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
That's right.
Mr. Cullen, you should thank him for that.
Mrs. Shanahan, you have five minutes.
Liberal
Brenda Shanahan Liberal Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC
I'll share my time with Paul, or we'll see how we go.
I'm intrigued, Mr. Geist. This is an area that has been thrust upon me. I need to learn about it, and I need to learn quite quickly, actually.
What concerns me is the privacy aspect here. Please explain to us again how net neutrality protects citizen privacy. I'd like to understand that better.
Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
Sure. There have been, as I mentioned, a couple of examples where privacy has been directly implicated through net neutrality.
One would be where a service that might provide better privacy might either not emerge or might struggle to work effectively. The example that I gave involved Internet telephony services. This would be things like Skype or other sorts of services that, today, we often take for granted. If we think back a few years ago, however, many of the large carriers were really concerned about the ability for people to make free calls using these Internet-based services. They saw them as competitors. It used to be the case that on your smart phone you couldn't even access Wi-Fi networks because people didn't want you accessing Wi-Fi. They wanted to sell you the data.
These were seen as truly competitive services, and there were attempts in some instances to try to stop people from being able to actively use those services. How do you do that? In one instance, in the United States, they did it by proactively blocking. In another instance, here in Canada, they did it by reducing the speeds that were available for that service, so that they were so slow so as to not function effectively. That's a practice known as throttling.
If you do that, you have potentially privacy-enhancing technologies that are rendered unusable or blocked on the basis of a carrier deciding that they prefer you not to use that service but to use something else. That has clear privacy implications for someone.
Liberal
Brenda Shanahan Liberal Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC
What about the flip side? Is there a way that not having net neutrality actually allows these big carriers...? I seem to sense that there's a difference between the traditional big carriers—Ma Bell, television, cable networks—and those who are sort of the innovative entrepreneurs, the anarchist types of actors in the Internet. There's a culture difference there, and that's what I'm trying to understand.
Is this, out-and-out, the traditional ISP companies just trying to squash any competition whatsoever? If so, are we equipped to combat this?
Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
To start, yes, it is the traditional ISPs, the carriers, that we're talking about in terms of concerns about violations around net neutrality.
What they became concerned with a number of years ago was that they were seeing much of the value in these networks being accrued by other players. You can use your Internet service to make those phone calls, to access video, to engage in education, to do all these different things. The way that some of the carriers used to describe it is that they didn't want to be left just providing a dumb pipe: “All we do is provide you with the ability to transmit those bits and somebody else gets all the economic advantage.”
They said, “Wouldn't it be great if I get to share in some of your revenue simply for transferring your bits?” The response from some of the players was, “Well, hold on a second, I am paying for you to transfer my bits. I have to subscribe to the service and I've paid for all these services.” What they were hoping to do was to leverage, in a sense, their gatekeeper status as the intermediary to say that they can actually charge even more and find different ways to do that.
I understand why, economically, they would have incentives to do that in the same way that they might have incentives to favour some of their own content or to stop or make it more difficult to access other kinds of content, but that's not a good enough reason for us to allow it to happen. In fact, that provides us with a very strong, compelling reason that we shouldn't be allowing that to happen.
The type of robust Internet ecosystem we've seen emerge today that has had that transformative effect on everything from commerce to education to culture has really benefited dramatically from that ability to ensure that a bit is a bit is a bit and I get to ensure that my content gets treated in the same way that some other giant's does. The fear is that net neutrality will do away with that bedrock principle that has allowed many of these businesses to emerge.
Liberal
Brenda Shanahan Liberal Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC
Who is in the best position to ensure that the privacy of individual citizens is protected in this universe?
Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
The online privacy issues, of course, extend even beyond net neutrality. Net neutrality can be a factor and an assistance in potential misuse of their information in terms of, let's say, the deep packet inspection example that I provided, where you had providers who were trying to drill down and examine precisely what type of application people were using at times. If they could do that, they could slow that particular application. The ability to examine that information might involve highly personal information.
The CRTC recognized that and it stepped in and said you can't use this kind of personal information for any of these other sorts of purposes. You can't sell it and you can't use it for marketing. You can't use it for any of those sorts of things. That's an example where the CRTC could use net neutrality rules to better protect privacy.
There are, of course, other instances where we've seen the privacy commissioner and PIPEDA step up to try to provide protections for privacy, because those rules will also govern the approach that we have. Today we have many telecommunications providers, for example, that offer up transparency reports that describe instances where they disclose their information to law enforcement, and the like, but still not all of them.
Bell, for example, is the largest provider in the country. They still do not offer up a telecom transparency report so that people would know how their information is being used, in contrast to the other large providers such as Telus and Rogers.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
Thank you, Mr. Geist.
We have had a slight change. We have Mr. Cullen for three minutes, and then Mr. Kent for whatever time is left.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Can you just finish that last point? Did you say “despite being ordered to”? I might have missed that.
Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
They haven't been ordered to issue a telecom transparency report, although I think there is an argument to be made under PIPEDA that it should be a requirement under the accountability principle.
NDP
Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
This is Bell.
A number of years ago, most of the large providers began issuing transparency reports. The big Internet companies do the same. Bell has been the lone big holdout in Canada.
Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
You'd have to ask them.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Imagine for a moment that you were them. What would you say? It seems odd. They care about their social licence and their corporate reputation. Not being transparent about something such as this seems strange to me.
Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
That is, of course, the same company that I just described that's putting forward the proposal for website blocking.
Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
They seem to be less concerned sometimes. At least from my perspective as a consumer and someone who follows this, they sometimes seem somewhat less concerned about their reputation, at least around issues such as privacy.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
My Bell phone just slowed down. That's so weird.
Do we know how many complaints are filed with our regulator over potential blocking or slowing down of sites?
Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
We do.
Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
It is.
The story actually behind that is that we didn't at first. As it happens, I launched an access to information request with the CRTC a year or two after the process had been taking place to identify what on earth was happening. What I got out of that was that large numbers of complaints were being filed. I also found that the CRTC wasn't acting very aggressively on some of those complaints.
They started acting more aggressively, and in the aftermath of that, began on a quarterly basis publishing the number of complaints.
NDP
Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
I got that information in the first instance through access to information. Now the CRTC proactively, on a quarterly basis, discloses. They don't disclose the details. They disclose how many complaints they got and how many complaints remain open.