Entries Tagged 'Public Policy' ↓

Library and Archives Canada has released their new Canadian Digital Information Strategy. This release is a draft - comments are welcome from “any interested person or organization” by Nov 23, 2007. I haven’t looked at it yet, but given the current climate in Canada, it’s certain to be an interesting document. (Via Michael Geist)

Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg has published a piece on the extremely limiting role that US mobile carriers have forced on consumers in the US: Free My Phone.

A shortsighted and often just plain stupid federal government has allowed itself to be bullied and fooled by a handful of big wireless phone operators for decades now. And the result has been a mobile phone system that is the direct opposite of the PC model. It severely limits consumer choice, stifles innovation, crushes entrepreneurship, and has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world, just as the cellphone is morphing into a powerful hand-held computer.

As bad as things are in the US, they’re that much worse in Canada, where the same conditions apply - except that here, we get to pay a huge premium for the “privilege”.

Google Public Policy Blog. I’d like them to clarify, as a matter of public policy, what permissions they are seeking, if any, related to published books and more about their position on scanning in printed works, in or out of copyright.

Accenture has been doing surveys of Government online initiatives for the past five years. In the latest report, Canada came out on top. You can access the report here: eGovernment Leadership: High Performance, Maximum Value. [via Ed Bilodeau]

and today he points to a San Antonio Current article about Clear Channel that demonstrates a point I’ve been making for years. The CDA was NOT the worst part of the Telecom Reform Act. It was a smoke screen to divert attention from the negative effects of the concentration of media ownership, which is much more efficient by any measure than overt censorship at ensuring that diverse views go unheard, unpublished.

wrote today, “I gotta dig how fast and far the People Vs. Hollywood political conversation is spreading.” For the record, I’d like to throw one small point out, maybe to fill in the historical side of this a little. People are fixated upon the DMCA and its role in overturning old US copyright law traditions. It is right to be fixated on that insidious law - but it didn’t begin there.

In its own way, the Telecom Reform Act of 1996 was as important as the DCMA. Everyone focused on the Communications Decency Act back then, but that was clearly just a smoke screen from the beginning. The types of business combination that were finally allowed under the Telecom Reform Act are what has given rise to the large, monopolistic firms who are driving things currently in Hollywood.

Of course those combinations started to occur well before 1996 - but the “reforms” in 96 stripped away the barriers to companies who could own the whole pipeline and control it from head office. Before 1996 there were enough different kinds of player in the food chain that it was harder to get traction, either operationally or as a lobbying force.