Slashdot Mirror
Canada's Telco Bell Tried To Have VPNs Banned During NAFTA Negotiations (techdirt.com)
Telecom company Bell urged the Canadian government to formulate rules that would make some VPN services illegal in the country ahead of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiations. The rationale behind the request? It doesn't want people in the country to use VPNs to access the US catalog of some streaming services like Netflix. TechDirt, quotes a paywalled report: "In its submission, Bell argued that Canadians accessing content from a US service with a VPN 'unjustly enriches the US service, which has not paid for the Canadian rights' but nonetheless makes that content available to Canadians. Bell's media arm reportedly spends millions on content for it streaming service, Crave TV, which allows Canadians to stream content from American networks such as HBO and Showtime."
Again though, it's not the VPN doing that. And if you want to stop users from flocking to better content catalogs elsewhere on the continent, you should focus your ire on the things causing that to happen -- like increasingly dated and absurd geo-viewing restrictions, and your own substandard content offerings that fail to adequately match up.
Again though, it's not the VPN doing that. And if you want to stop users from flocking to better content catalogs elsewhere on the continent, you should focus your ire on the things causing that to happen -- like increasingly dated and absurd geo-viewing restrictions, and your own substandard content offerings that fail to adequately match up.
Am I the only one that at first read that as "Taco Bell" and wondered why a fast food place gave two shits about VPNs on their WiFi?
It is important for the population to understand how trade effects your personal life.
However banning VPN's goes against Internet Freedom.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Perhaps it is time to give Bell the boot.
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
ISP's / TV system can't own content laws are needed.
Yes we want to lock you into our system and WE ARE the only choice for your ISP as well.
I banned Bell Canada from my life long time ago because of infinite billing
issues, really poor customer service, abusive influence on the CRTC (our FTC),
... I'll NEVER do any business with them (personal and for my small business).
And with this, asking to ban some VPN services, this is the last nail in the
coffin for them.
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
they run their own Canadian streaming service
Here the list of Bell's subsidiaries to ban. I didn't even know that The Source (formely Radio Shack) is Bell's property :
Bell Canada
Bell Media
Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment (37.5%)
Bell Mobility
Bell Aliant
Virgin Mobile Canada
Bell Internet
Bell TV
Bell Fibe TV
Fibe
Bell MTS
Lucky Mobile
The Source (retailer)
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
This right here is why geographic restrictions on content should be illegal. Europe got it right when they banned geo-blocking. It only hurts consumers by diminishing the free market and propping up monopolies/oligopolies. It can never have any real benefit.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Unfortunately Bell is THE telephone company in the east and a lot of people don't really have the option.
some karma... and kinda lukewarm about it.
Bingo. They also got slapped by the CRTC several times in the last decade. Two cases that stand out, the first was with GAS(last mile) to DSL customers, and wanting to charge TPIA(third party companies that lease the last mile) 150% tariff rates. Bell and it's buddies(Rogers, Telus, and a couple of others) though they had this in the bag. This led to a stand-off between the CRTC and the Harper Conservatives, along with the minister of industry. With a direct threat that they'd have their mandate for regulation pulled if they sided with Bell and this anti-competitive action. Needless to say the CRTC fell in line with the government.
The second was with Bell's streaming service, where they weren't billing their DSL or cell customers for data being used while watching their own streaming service but billing people who were using netflix(despite netflix having provided caching boxes to bell) for data use, and taking it out of their monthly cap. They got slapped hard for it and got levied with an injunction for anti-competitive practices.
This is more of the same for Bell. The current shitshow is Bell trying to block TPIA's from getting access to fiber links for high speed internet, in some cases like in Oxford and Middlesex counties(Ontario), they've acted in a manner to block TPIA's from laying their own fiber - with the CRTC having to step in. This is after Bell saying they had "no interest" in laying fiber to remote communities in the heaviest populated part of Canada(Windsor to Montreal, QC corridor)
Om, nomnomnom...
Don't forget CraveTV. If you subscribe to that, you're giving the bastards money. A shame, there's a few things on there I want to watch, but not enough to give Bell even a nickel.
> In Canada, one refers to them as Bell Canada.
Yeah, no. Canadian here. We call them Bell. Or shit. Shit works too.
It's not "Bell", it's "Bell Canada". They were simply the Canadian arm of the American Bell Telephone Company until 1975. Sounds like they still have the spirit of the original... You know, "We don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company."
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not completely true. Telus definitely has their own backbone. Particularly west of Ontario. They do have a cell tower sharing agreement with Bell and if you use a Telus cell phone in Ontario or East you will likely be using a Bell tower. This is true of many carriers though (like Freedom outside their core calling areas). Also, I believe Bell phones use Telus towers in many areas west of Ontario.
The intent of NAFTA was to create a common market for the U.S., Canada, and Mexico by eliminating trade barriers between those countries. If it makes sense to eliminate geo-blocking among EU states, then it also makes sense to eliminate it among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico for precisely the same reason.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
because odds are you're just going to do business with a subsidiary. And even if they company isn't owned outright odds are good that it's the same people sitting on the board of directors and the same folks are the major owners via stocks. In short, you can't get away from Mega corps anymore.
This is why we need more government regulation. We've let too many mergers & acquisitions go on.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
if you are a canadian citizen, you are invested in BCE.
CPP IB has almost a hundred million invested : http://www.cppib.com/documents...
The REAL absurdity is that today, in 2019, content produced in the US or Canada STILL ends up with different owners of the licensing rights in both countries.
I mean, seriously. I can understand the problem of legacy stuff that was created years ago, back when things like making moving prints, physically transporting them from theater to theater around the country, and promoting them locally was a big deal, but Jesus Fucking Christ on Rollerblades... pretty much ANY English-language TV show or movie that gets produced today and released in one country is practically guaranteed to end up in the other country within a year.
Technically, the media market between the US and Canada is about as frictionless as two media markets can possibly GET. We both use the same TV standard, have the same TV framerates, watch the same TV shows and movies, and listen to the same music.
Before someone brings up Quebec, I'd argue that French-speaking Canadians endure even WORSE grief due to the silliness of US-Canadian licensing complexity. Consider, for example, the tens or hundreds of thousands of French Canadians who live in Florida and New York & have to jump through silly hoops to watch French-Canadian TV shows that haven't yet been officially licensed yet for distribution in the US. Also, there's no need to "protect" French-language shows... French is a major worldwide language with a HUGE international export market, and Canada has become a worldwide film and TV powerhouse precisely BECAUSE most Canadian actors & actresses are now bilingual. In Canada, you can produce a film or movie that shoots close-up speaking scenes twice (once in English, once in French, same actors for both), use the same actors to dub THEMSELVES for the remainder of the scenes, and cost-effectively produce content with "native" production values in BOTH languages.
Incidentally, the "shoot twice... once in English, once in another language" strategy is something that was uncommon in the past, but has become popular in recent years thanks to both cheaper digital editing workflows and multilingual actors. The Norwegian+Netflix TV show "Norsemen" is a perfect example of it -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ).
And I'm NOT arguing that the licensing barriers between other countries make much more sense... I'm just pointing out the utter and complete absurdity of the present state of licensing affairs between two countries whose media markets have about as close to 100% overlap as you can get. Of all the things NAFTA has dropped the ball on over the years, this is probably the most galling example of something that SHOULD today be completely frictionless and transparent.
It wouldn't even take much beyond a treaty between the US and Canada & the necessary enabling legislation to declare that henceforth, after some future date, all newly-created (or newly-licensed within the US-Canada market) content licensed for distribution in one country is automatically licensed for distribution in both, and that no contractual language limiting the rights of a licensee to do that will be enforced.
At first, there would be too much legacy content with split rights ownership for much to change... but eventually, there would be enough content with unified licensing that some new service would launch that didn't bother to distinguish between US and Canadian customers, and as a result would only license content AVAILABLE under unified licensing. The aftermath would be a flurry of companies who owned country-specific rights bartering, trading, selling, and buying those country-specific rights to consolidate their ownership and increase the content's value by making IT eligible for licensing to that country-agnostic service.
Eventually, there would be enough licensing-consolidation, even of legacy content, for services like Netflix and Comcast to decide that it simply wasn't worth bothering anymore with content that demanded geographic restrictions, which would render content that COULDN'T be licensed under unified terms almost without commercial value until someone DID manage to buy up and aggregate the distribution rights.
The point of NAFTA was never to remove trade barriers for *people.* It was to remove them, strategically, for companies.
I'll bet you Netflix doesn't pay tariffs for importing content into Canada.
neither do they for importing content anywhere. Duties and tax code pre-date the Internet.