Evidence of meeting #128 for Industry, Science and Technology in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was copyright.

A video is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Andy Kaplan-Myrth  Vice-President, Regulatory and Carrier Affairs, TekSavvy Solutions Inc.
Robert Malcolmson  Senior Vice-President, Regulatory Affairs, BCE Inc.
David Watt  Senior Vice-President, Regulatory, Rogers Communications Inc.
Cynthia Rathwell  Vice-President, Legislative and Policy Strategy, Shaw Communications Inc.
David de Burgh Graham  Laurentides—Labelle, Lib.
Mark Graham  Senior Legal Counsel, BCE Inc.
Dan Albas  Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC
Kristina Milbourn  Director, Copyright and Broadband, Rogers Communications Inc.
Michael Chong  Wellington—Halton Hills, CPC
Jay Kerr-Wilson  Legal Counsel, Fasken Martineau, Shaw Communications Inc.

4:45 p.m.

Senior Vice-President, Regulatory Affairs, BCE Inc.

Robert Malcolmson

For that type of blocking, yes.

4:45 p.m.

Liberal

Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON

That's for that type of blocking.

David.

4:45 p.m.

Senior Vice-President, Regulatory, Rogers Communications Inc.

David Watt

I was just going to add, as well, that the reason for the desire for an order from the CRTC for the blocking would be that the order would apply to all ISPs. For example, to go back to the very start of the question, if one of us felt we were authorized to do this.... We're not, but if we went rogue and blocked that IP address, people who wanted to consume it would just switch to a different ISP within Canada, so we do want it to be an actual order that would apply to all service providers.

4:45 p.m.

Liberal

Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON

Andy, do you want to add something?

4:45 p.m.

Vice-President, Regulatory and Carrier Affairs, TekSavvy Solutions Inc.

Andy Kaplan-Myrth

Yes. There are various technical issues here. Without taking too long and going too far into the weeds, I'll say that this is a great example of why people call this sort of regime a slippery slope. If we start down this road of requiring blocking, we're going to run into one problem after another for which this is ineffective.

DNS blocking is a way of basically taking a phone number out of the phone book; it's disassociating the IP address from the domain name. It does not block access to the website. It doesn't stop end-users from using alternative DNS providers, which are provided by major companies, including Google. Many users use them because those DNS providers are sometimes faster than their own ISPs.

If we block using DNS blocking and remove those, then we're going to be back here five years from now talking about why we need to implement deep packet inspection, and five years after that, we're going to be talking about why we need to block VPNs. After that, you can bet that users are going to find other ways to circumvent each of these ways of blocking them.

What we need to do is protect the regime that we've had all along, which is common carriage. We carry the bits. We don't look at them. We don't judge them. We don't decide what to block.

4:45 p.m.

Senior Vice-President, Regulatory, Rogers Communications Inc.

David Watt

Could I just make two points there? One, where this regime has been put in place, there's been a 70% to 90% reduction. We're not claiming that it's going to stop it all, but it has been effective in stopping the majority of the theft.

In terms of the slippery slope, we'd really like to deal with the issue today. That's all we can deal with. We need to deal with it first. If we come to a subsequent problem, we'll have to deal with it then, but there's no reason not to deal with the first problem because you think a second one may come along.

4:45 p.m.

Liberal

Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON

Thank you.

Mr. Chair, I want to thank you. You've been quite liberal with my time.

4:45 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy

Are you calling me a Liberal? Thank you very much.

Mr. Masse, you have your two minutes.

4:45 p.m.

NDP

Brian Masse NDP Windsor West, ON

Thank you.

I want Shaw and BCE, Bell, to get a chance to respond to the skinny package thing. I'm trying to understand and appreciate what's happening out there and what's motivating people. There has to be a symbiotic relationship here of some sort.

What are the tools? You're suggesting that it may not be price-driven, but I do want to hear from you in terms of your rollout of the skinny package and where you rank yourself in there. I've heard Mr. Watt's perceptions on that, so I'd like to hear from Shaw and Bell on the same thing.

4:45 p.m.

Vice-President, Legislative and Policy Strategy, Shaw Communications Inc.

Cynthia Rathwell

Thanks.

I don't want to rank ourselves vis-à-vis our colleagues. I think we've done very well with the rollout of the skinny basic, and I think our customers have responded. It suits some of their needs. It's available, and it's the basis for all packages on which we build. Whether it goes to content packages or pick and pay from there, our subscribers are happy with it. We think the price is reasonable.

If we're talking about the attractiveness of “free”, I could turn for a second to an experience we had on the satellite side with the local television satellite service program. This was a benefit that we offered up to the CRTC to provide a package of free local signals to Canadians who had lost access to over-the-air transmission because of the digital transition. Their transmitters hadn't been converted to digital. We offered it to a maximum of 33,000 people, and 35,000 or more subscribed.

There was no way to scientifically monitor who was taking it. A lot of the people clearly were taking it from their cottage. A lot of them were taking it from areas where there were local signals available; they just wanted it for free. We continue to get calls that are beginning to express concern about the fact that this program is time-limited. It was for the duration of a licence. About seven years is what it's been offered for.

We're happy to have had that stopgap, but it was illustrative to us that free is very attractive. It's not matter of a failure of our skinny basic offering or our services.

4:50 p.m.

NDP

Brian Masse NDP Windsor West, ON

Thank you.

Mr. Malcolmson or Mr. Graham, do you want to add to that?

4:50 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy

You will have time. We'll come back to that.

4:50 p.m.

NDP

Brian Masse NDP Windsor West, ON

Okay.

4:50 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy

This takes us to the end of the first round. We will have a second round. We'll be mindful of potential votes. If we have to cut it short to go for the votes, we will.

We'll start our second round with you, Mr. Graham. It's fine if you want to give it to Mr. Lametti.

You have seven minutes, Mr. Lametti.

4:50 p.m.

Liberal

David Lametti Liberal LaSalle—Émard—Verdun, QC

I want to pick up on that question again, though. I think you have to justify why we can't use the court system and why we need another body. If in fact you're going after, as you're saying, the really popular sites, why do we need to have a separate body when the court system, the Federal Court system in particular, could work in looking at injunctive relief?

You're not poor litigants. You have fairly good resources at your disposal. Why should we create another apparatus, which would then be open to abuse and open to influence, perhaps, by industry agencies like yours?

4:50 p.m.

Senior Legal Counsel, BCE Inc.

Mark Graham

I'll start.

I think you mentioned when you were asking the question that maybe we could do something on the injunction. What we've requested in our remarks today is that injunctive relief directly against intermediaries in the Federal Court would be a significant help on this issue.

There are a few reasons why we thought about the CRTC for the FairPlay application. One is that the CRTC is often seen as more accessible, for smaller litigants in particular, which might include creators and rights holders, who can't as easily pursue something through a lengthy Federal Court process and are familiar with the CRTC. I think it's also more accessible for small ISPs who often appear before the CRTC and have expertise in that area. That's one reason.

The other reason is section 36 of the Telecommunications Act, which says that CRTC approval is required for a service provider to disable access to a piracy site. In the CRTC's view, that applies even if a court has ordered you to disable access.

If the situation is that you go to court and then you have to have a duplicative proceeding at the CRTC anyways, and given that what we're talking about is the management of the country's telecommunications networks and we have a regulator that's tasked with managing the regulation of those networks, it seemed appropriate to be there.

4:50 p.m.

Senior Vice-President, Regulatory Affairs, BCE Inc.

Robert Malcolmson

Mark gave an example of our collective attempt to shut down a pirate operating in Montreal, and it has been a two-year saga. It's been lots of money in terms of legal fees, and it still isn't where it should be.

The site-blocking application creates an accessible channel for content owners of all stripes to go and protect their content. Imagine if you're a small content creator or owner and you have to go to the Federal Court, and you have to spend two years litigating. You could spend on legal fees the full amount of revenue you're ever going to get from your show.

As Mark said, the idea of putting it in the hands of the CRTC, when we're going to have to go there anyway under the Telecommunications Act, made a lot of sense, from an accessibility, cost, and efficiency standpoint.

4:50 p.m.

Liberal

David Lametti Liberal LaSalle—Émard—Verdun, QC

Mr. Kaplan-Myrth, do you have any thoughts about that?

4:50 p.m.

Vice-President, Regulatory and Carrier Affairs, TekSavvy Solutions Inc.

Andy Kaplan-Myrth

Taking a step back, I feel that there are a few different ways we've talked about to address that possibly illegal infringing content: going after the boxes themselves, or the people distributing the boxes, or identifying where that content is being captured from a legitimate source and then uploaded onto the Internet. FairPlay gets at one part of that. Really, it's blocking access to a site, so that would maybe choke off how end-users using those boxes would connect to the uploaded streams.

There are different ways of addressing this. I think that FairPlay creates an extremely powerful tool for a particular group adjacent to the CRTC, which would maintain this list that end-users of sites would then not have access to. I think there are probably much less blunt ways to find the content that's being uploaded and use Federal Court processes to stop that, or choking it off in other places, without creating such a powerful tool that, I think, is very ripe for misuse.

4:55 p.m.

Liberal

David Lametti Liberal LaSalle—Émard—Verdun, QC

Thank you.

4:55 p.m.

Laurentides—Labelle, Lib.

David de Burgh Graham

Thanks.

I have a whole lot of questions and about three minutes to get through them all.

4:55 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy

Two minutes.

4:55 p.m.

Laurentides—Labelle, Lib.

4:55 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy

You have two minutes.

4:55 p.m.

Laurentides—Labelle, Lib.

David de Burgh Graham

Oh, I'll talk even faster. Jesus.

To Rogers, you said you're here as a content owner, and I believe Bell would be here primarily as a content owner as well.

Of the large companies, who is here to defend the users of the Internet, as opposed to the content rights holder? Is there not a conflict between the two for you as a vertically integrated company?