Merci, monsieur le président.
Mr. Chair, I am delighted to be here this afternoon to voice our support, as a business association, for this anti-spam legislation.
I'd like to begin by telling you about our association. We are well known, but it might be a good idea to remind you that
the companies that make up our membership—we're the national association of the information and communications technology industry--make the hardware, make the software, offer the services, and create the applications that make the Internet, make it work, and help people use it. Our members are very heavily involved in fighting spam and fighting malware and in helping Canadians to fight these. They deploy tremendous efforts to do this, and we believe that legislation will help in that fight. We therefore support the bill, and we support going after spam--spam against consumers and spam against businesses as well.
I was also personally a member of the spam task force, and I recall that we had a lot of discussions around the concept of spam and the fundamental approach to the issue. All the members of the task force, whether consumer representatives or business representatives, agreed to an opt-in regime, which, by the way, was not the rule in the U.S., and we thought there were flaws there. We also agreed that legislation should cover more than spam and address other topics such as spyware and malware, but I have to say we did not have as much discussion there about what particular approach to take. We definitely wanted to have something that would go after spyware, but we hadn't resolved how to do that without impeding a lot of the legitimate transactions that take place.
We are here to offer our expertise to the committee, and we're offering to bring our expertise and work with the government to handle the changes we need to make to the bill to make sure it doesn't have unintended consequences. The whole purpose of this legislation is to facilitate and increase confidence in the use of the Internet and the digital economy by Canadian businesses and consumers. We approach the changes that we need to make to the bill so that they actually achieve that purpose, as opposed to possibly impeding electronic commerce and making it in some cases more difficult to protect consumers. For example, as Barry has indicated, there are some practical, day-to-day things that everybody would say absolutely need to be able to continue, and they should not be made illegal under the bill.
I see two categories here. When we're talking about spam itself and areas such as implied consent or inferring consent from the circumstances, I think all of us can look to a specific list of practical day-to-day examples and say let's work on the language of the legislation so it does not cover that.
Then there are more technical aspects to the bill. When we come to spyware and malware, or redirecting ISP addresses, or harvesting ISP addresses as well, we fall into a world where even the lawyers who have been involved in this area for many years need to go to our technical people and say let's think through how things work, and ask for some examples of how things happen on the Internet to help users or consumers. We don't realize how it works, and until we do, we may not be able to get the right language in the bill to make sure we don't capture things we don't like.
All our computers need to be protected against malware almost instantaneously when we turn them on, for example. Every second the computer is on the Internet and not protected leaves it open to being infested with viruses that are very difficult to deal with.
Just to give you an example, if you put in a system that has to have the consumer approve a very urgent patch to a gap in security on the computer, the consumer might click on that right away or they might go and get a coffee while the computer is getting turned up, and then you go a few minutes with the thing unprotected. So you don't want that.
You also want certain interventions to be done without really representing a significant transaction. There may be things that happen very automatically, very quickly, and you don't want to start impeding that by requiring explicit consent.
It might be difficult to describe that in sufficient terms, broadly enough, up front, to get the kind of consent you need. It's the same with the redirection of addresses. Sometimes it could be more than just an ISP or a service provider who furnishes the access to the Internet. It can be a site or a service provider that provides you with a portal or services. It could be a search engine and so on. Sometimes you type in a name wrong and the service will redirect you to the correct address you really wanted, and sometimes they will remind you, “Did you really want to spell it this way?” Those are all things that happen instantaneously and very smoothly on the Internet. We don't want to start making that very complicated.
For us, therefore, as I say, we need to work with our technical people to say let's think through all these things and then we can make the changes that are required.
I want to finish by saying that we support getting this bill through and we do not want any undue delay in it. I would say that's the basic theme that I find when I talk to the other business associations. We explain sometimes, by referring to principles or whatever, what we see are problems with the bill, but from our standpoint, the changes that are needed are doable. They're not changes in the principles of the bill. They fit the principles of the bill, and we suggest we approach them from a practical standpoint. You will find that we can make the changes that are needed to have the bill actually achieve its purpose, which is to facilitate electronic commerce and facilitate the use of the Internet by Canadians.
Thank you.