Canada's Bell Tried to Have VPNs Banned During NAFTA Negotiations | Hacker News Reader

Canada's Bell Tried to Have VPNs Banned During NAFTA Negotiations

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235 pointsbenryon46 comments

> 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”

Odd how 'free trade' doesn't apply to consumers. Are they not allowed to import digital goods?

> Odd how 'free trade' doesn't apply to consumers. Are they not allowed to import digital goods?

Bell doesn't want free trade on the business side, either. They are part of an oligopoly that is protected from foreign competition by laws on Canadian media ownership. Media and cultural industries were exceptions to both the NAFTA agreement and the newer USMCA agreement.

Bell’s all for cheaper networking gear though.

Their nationwide 3G network (which they split the build cost with one of their “competitors”) was built by Huawei and Nokia.

Even if they’re not currently buying Huawei gear, they still benefit from a formidable competitor for a supplier..

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/bell-teams-up-wit...

It is usually how these things work. The human engaging in arbitrage is a crime or something a corporation cries foul over. A corporation, or sometimes just a rich human, doing it is "just good business".

uhh... you're missing a critical part of that equation which is government/private influence. A private corporation can't "ban" VPNs and encryption without a huge backlash from their retail customer base and the corporate entities which depend on their networks and the full lobbying might of all tech businesses in general which profit from a healthy free internet.

The only way this would work is via unilateral gov policy, which in recent years are common in mega-trade deals (as some politicians have called it the "gold standard" of state/capitalist countries policy), and which is exactly why Bell never tried to do it privately themselves.

Much like the majority of the worst examples of major corporate abuses in the paste few decades they have almost always been businesses who are close friends with government. Often in the most heavily regulated industries: telecom/ISPs, pharma [1], finance [no citation needed, see post-2008 policies which crippled small-bank competition and reduced the market to 5 mega-banks], and energy - as we've seen recently with PG&E in California:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-politicians-direct-capital...

Despite rhetoric about "corporate greed" causing the PG&E safety lapses, the California government has played a massive role in controlling PG&E's capital expenditure and safety policy for two decades (including giving them a free pass from any market-consequences after a similar fire in 2017) AND they already charge the highest per person energy costs in the entire country.

Given that forced mandate PG&E simply couldn't have afforded the money on those massive safety improvements even if they wanted to (without further burden on tax payers), they were already pushing their customers to the max via state influenced spending policies on climate change tech. Plus what incentive did they have when they had 1500 other incidents and their friends in gov repeatedly gave them a free pass?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical...

This narrative fashions PG&E as victims when they are the criminals here. Please have a look at Judge Alsup's early comments here [1].

The regulatory framework was compromised by lobbying and the usual problems like ex PG&E execs in regulatory positions so there was no oversight. This is not a problem of government but corrupt compromised 'business friendly' governance enabled by the twin evils of regulatory capture and corruption which we have seen replicated in all industries.

The idea that without governance these companies would behave themselves is some kind of mythical fantasy completely disconnected from the real world and a long catalogued history of self serving greed driven behavior. No business is under obligation to behave unethically to make money.

[1] https://apnews.com/e297eb8082294ee19588a05cd87670ec

Of course PG&E is not the victim, they should have suffered the consequences of their negligence long ago. Consequences which they are finally facing today after the political protection they've been offered for decades is no longer viable - aka easily hidden in exchange for backroom deals with the state.

No company could have survived the 1500 safety lapses PG&E made without significant changes via legitimately confronting the liability normal private companies face without massive intervention by government (aka the securitization of liabilities which get pushed onto California consumers which is why they pay the highest rates in the country).

There are countless examples where PG&E was given a free pass by the local governments in the name of keeping the status quo, including executives/board smartly making politically-friendly climate policy compromises to keep on their good side in exchange for protection from any real liability.

When you get compromises from private entities in exchange for free-passes for prior negligence you only get bigger and bigger failures... which is exactly what happened. In the past the smaller compromises were easier to hide, but they consistently were getting worse (this isn't even the first bankruptcy). PG&E has never been held fully accountable as any non-well politically connected company would.

Finally, the gov "keeping the power on" excuse still had plenty of options that don't include avoiding massive restructuring or total bankruptcy/destruction of the negligent parties. Better, more responsible, companies should have took over long ago. But that doesn't happen in state heavy economic systems where political favours are preferred over markets as it is in California, just like it doesn't happen in other more obvious negligent countries like Russia and China. When politically connected companies always survive regardless of behaviour then consumers and the public always lose. Period.

>> 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”

I see something else weird. Why would a Canadian politician care about this? You don't buy Canadian distribution rights from Canada or from any Canadian entity. You buy them from the copyright holder.

If I'm an American tourist in Canada and I want to watch Moana on my Netflix account, and I do that by tunneling back to my home computer and appearing to be located in the US, then Netflix is inappropriately delivering me content that they gave Disney money for the right to distribute within the US. But if they also needed to buy the right to distribute it in Canada... they'd give that money to Disney too. Why does Canada need Netflix to give more money to an American company?

> Why would a Canadian politician care about this? You don't buy Canadian distribution rights from Canada or from any Canadian entity. You buy them from the copyright holder.

Because the Canadian company paid for exclusive access to that content within Canada for the purpose of making profit. This generates tax revenue and employment and increases the value fo the company for the shareholders, things politicians care about to various degrees.

1. Company buys something that doesn’t exist.

2. Company lobbies government to demand that their something must be made to exist.

Genius.

Many times the content is never made available to Canadians! It’s quite frustrating because we want to their content but there is no legal way.

FWIW, Bell's argument is completely silly, because typically when I see people doing this, it's to get access to TV shows that they wouldn't otherwise be able to at all.

Its not a free trade issue, its a matter of contractual distribution agreements with geographical limitations. That's pretty common in many industries, not just those dealing in digital goods.

The consumer never agreed to those contracts. He bought the goods in the US, and imported them into Canada, via a VPN. He could just as well have driven across the border, bought a DVD, and carried it back.

DVDs have region locking. The United States and Canada happen to be in the same region, and there are bypasses, but technical controls against importing digital goods are already normalized, and I doubt this analogy will convince policymakers.

This is irrelevant. Replace DVD with an apple. The point is that free trade between countries means you should be able to buy in one country and use in the other country.

The policymakers can be safely assumed to be hostile on this anyway (usually because they're bought by the lobbyists). The goal, therefore, is to throw them out and replace them with ones that are not, not to convince them. Convincing is for the voters to do that.

DVD region locking isn't much of a "technical control". There are 8 regions, because that's the number of bits in a byte. The region lock is a single byte that specifies which regions are intended to read the disc. On the honor system, a DVD player is supposed to read this byte, check the bit for its region, and refuse to play the disc if the bit is unset.

The only "control" here is that it's assumed you don't have a copy of the DVD spec and don't realize what the lock consists of. Ignoring it suffices to bypass it.

>technical controls against importing digital goods are already normalized

then why is bell canada whining about VPNs, if they're normal and accepted?

Sounds like Bell doesn't really want to offer IP services. They should just pivot their business to work on a proprietary system they have 100% control over. Maybe resurrect OSI and convince Canadians it's better.

It's not surprising, we're talking about the same company that want to remove net neutrality in Canada.

Not only that, but they want to create a "website police" to block any website that they deem "dangerous".

Of course they don't want people to use VPN...

Being allowed options other than Bell has been a huge boon to consumers and businesses in Ontario.

Although we still overpay for everything and Bell probably still makes money on the underlying infrastructure, at least we don't have to deal with them directly.

I wonder what percentage of the Canadian population can receive terrestrial TV and radio transmissions? I can pick up the Washington stations in Vancouver, BC and even as far north as Squamish in good conditions, and that's without a particularly good antenna.

Many other Canadian cities like Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Kingston, Winnipeg, Quebec and Windsor, all seem pretty close to the border too. Of course it works the other way too, I can pick up Canadian radio in Bellingham or even Mount Vernon.

How do country based TV rights work in /that/ context?

There's a couple of services out there that help map which OTA stations people can access. Quebec City & Winnipeg aren't that close to any US population centres so they don't get nearly as many stations as places like Montreal or Vancouver. I was quite sad when I got to Calgary and couldn't pick up any US signals. That being said, the CRTC has some restrictions on these kinds of signals. You aren't allowed to import DirecTV/Dish equipment. Shaw Direct used to advertise to snowbirds that they could bring their dishes to their US homes but got their hands slapped by the FCC and stopped.

Almost the entire population of Canada lives within 50 miles of the US border.

Just to add another anecdote, I really appreciated being able to listen to the CBC radio channels throughout the metro Detroit area, and CBC news is officially offered (and included in most packages) through the local cable provider there.

I didn't realize people in many other parts of the country lacked access to CBC on TV until I moved elsewhere.

I didn't realize that CBC News was offered in the Detroit metro area. When I was a child growing up in the Canadian prairies, our CBS, NBC and ABC affiliates were Detroit based. Consequently, I watched a lot of Detroit news when I was a kid and names like Chuck Gaidica, Bill Bonds and Diana Lewis are as familiar to me as Canadian broadcasting icon Knowlton Nash.

I feel like I gained a lot of perspective and a different sense of the world through my exposure to Detroit news. And now, I'm happy to hear that kids in Detroit have the same opportunity, though in reverse.

Access to CBC in rural areas has actually gotten worse since the switch to digital only broadcasting a while back. My dad hasn't had cablr for years now he lost CBC shortly after that on the Sunshine Coast. Even after buying and then modifying and improving a couple digital antennas now.

That’s really too bad. I’d heard about that and I was going to experiment with one at my grandfathers in rural Ontario.

Anybody know much about extended those signals or successfully increasing the gain locally?

Sounds like an interesting and probably expensive problem which is why I am going to guess for now more effort hasn’t been made to extend those signals further.

My parents have the same issue in Northern BC. When I was growing up we had two channels. They now have no channels.

It’s surprising that they’ve never leased space on a free-to-Air satellite service. Or just mandated free carriage when issuing distribution licenses.

Poor anecdata:

I get a couple of channels from Buffalo area here in Toronto. One news station I think, though I forget which one. We mostly keep it to the local CityNews or CBC.

There’s also a handful of standard def mixed content channels. Bad sitcoms and the like.

So anybody on Bell Canada wouldn't be able to work remote and VPN into work? Would that apply to those working for Bell Canada, too? The absurdity of these companies is beyond belief.

Their target is specifically VPNs advertised or mostly used for bypassing regional restrictions and piracy.

Of course there's a massive grey area of "what about VPNs that aren't advertising that purpose but are used in that way" that they would exploit in the most hamfisted and self-beneficial manner possible, but that's par for the course for most corporate lobbying initiatives.

My guess is of course Bell would create their own VPN that would adhere to their own standards that you could use for a fee

How would you actually go about banning VPNs? This makes no sense. You can barely make a moral argument, and what is to prevent people from just tunneling into a server that is, say located in the Swiss alps?

Is there any publication of similar things that were brought up during these negotiations?

I started hosting some sites in Canada some time ago, and like what the privacy and similar policies are of this datacenter.

I was about to deploy more sites to the same center when I saw an article about some of the initial negotiations. I realized that in an effort to appease one set of companies or another group of people with whatever agendas, we may see the Canada gov change restrictions in certain ways making privacy and other things less protected.

So I started looking at other places and have yet to see anything about any final details on the agreements and attempted policy changes.

If anyone knows of some good resources to get a grip on this please share.

I guess it's Bell Let's Talk In Open Day, all day every day.

Good for them I’ve had so many problems with data ingress across that border on on our .ca

Lets ban Bell Canada. Here the list of Bell's subsidiaries to ban :

  - 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)
  - CraveTV

Looks like I manage to boycott them entirely without really trying.

> Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment (37.5%)

MLSE owns every Toronto pro sports franchise except the Blue Jays. (The Blue Jays, it turns out, are owned by Bell's competitor, Rogers.) But if Bell Canada only owns 37.5% of it, logically we only need to boycott 37.5% of the MLSE teams. Starting from the educated guess that the Maple Leafs are almost half of MLSE's value, the next biggest chunk--probably the closest to 37.5%--would be the Raptors, with their Canadian Football and MLS teams taking up the remaining sliver of value.

So, just boycott the Raptors and it'll work out.

I'd rather boycott the leafs because I'm tired of losing.

And because Buffalo's a long way to drive to see a pro hockey game in person?

Bell Media produces some of my favourite shows and I’ve really enjoyed CraveTV. Also, lifelong leafs fan. I think the only time Canadians boycotted pro hockey was when the NHL locked out the players and there were no games anyway!

So that’s not for me. But I am all for improving the CRTC and even nationalizing parts of our telecom infrastructure.

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