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.

Comments

Taco Bell

[darkain]

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?

Re:Taco Bell

[jwhyche]

Nope, several of us did the same thing.

Re:Taco Bell

[Translation Error]

Taco Bell was the only ISP to survive the net neutrality war.

I don't know how I feel about this.

[jellomizer]

It is important for the population to understand how trade effects your personal life.
However banning VPN's goes against Internet Freedom.

Time for a new phone.

[Major_Disorder]

Perhaps it is time to give Bell the boot.

Re:Time for a new phone.

[Solandri]

The problem is competition within Canada's telecom system is so lacking, it makes the U.S. (with its government-mandated cable monopolies and vertically integrated carriers preventing you from using devices sold by other carriers) look like paradise in comparison. I looked into getting a Canadian cell phone when I worked there for a couple years. It actually turned out to be cheaper for me to add the Canada roaming option to my U.S. cell phone plan. This is one area where Canada lags far behind the rest of the civilized world.

I said f***** to Bell long time ago

[grumpy-cowboy]

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.

Re:I said f***** to Bell long time ago

[DontBeAMoran]

Bell Canada didn't acquire Times New Roman, though. You can stop abusing the <code> tag.

Re:Let's ban Bell Canada instead

[grumpy-cowboy]

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)

Re:What's Bell's stake in this?

[Mashiki]

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)

The REAL absurdity

[Miamicanes]

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.