TORONTO – As stakeholders ponder Canada’s national digital strategy, Telus took the process a step further.
In a white paper presented earlier this week at the nextMedia conference in Toronto, the telco suggested that the broadband networks could be the “building blocks to support a digital media ecosystem”.
It proposed the following ten principles to help guide the on-going debate:
– Noting that the government cannot afford to fund the next generation of broadband infrastructure, Telus said that Canada should “trust the market” to do so by encouraging private sector investment.
– It proposed that government find “smart ways”, such as through revenues from the next spectrum auction, to support the strategy without using taxpayer dollars.
– Telus further recommended that future spectrum auctions be “fair and open”, noting that a flawed auction design at last summer’s wireless spectrum auction led to “massive overpayments of $2 billion” that could otherwise have been spent by bidders on building networks.
– Encouraging Canadians to think beyond their own borders, Telus described the Internet as a gateway to world markets, and predicted that wireless applications will be one of the biggest opportunities for young Canadian entrepreneurs. It also questioned whether foreign ownership rules and cultural protections are still appropriate, or whether they undermine innovation and increase the cost of capital.
– Telus called digital literacy, education, training and skills development “critical elements in building a broadband society”, and recommended that digital content not be limited to narratives/stories, but also include software and applications that enable the creation, distribution and sharing of content on-line.
– Calling governments “ill equipped to shape new media or to sustain markets that don’t exist”, Telus said that the government can play a vital role in stimulating investment and innovation. It described technology and consumer demand as the principal factors in reshaping markets.
– Canadians must have opportunities to access, communicate, interact, create and transact over open broadband networks, as open networks maximize innovation and investment opportunities. Telus said that investment in application development is “critical” to both economic and cultural opportunities.
– Copyright is not an absolute. Legislation may be a necessary framework for guidance, but it must be balanced against fair use and cannot prevent piracy. Balanced copyright can legitimize fair use and the right to create managed opportunities to exploit and monetize content in tandem with open network environments.
– Intellectual property is the currency of an information economy just as much as access to broadband is a prerequisite to participation. Economic growth or economic dependency will be directly correlated with Canada’s ability to develop, protect, exploit and profit from intellectual property.
– The consumer and public are already shaping markets and following their direction is the key to success.
Telus identified spectrum capacity as the next big barrier to growth. Calling the global growth in mobile data traffic “staggering”, and noting that spectrum is more rapidly consumed when consumers and businesses adopt more and more data applications, it described mobile data use as “the canary in the coal mine” because of the spectrum and backhaul capacity required to handle exponential traffic growth, particularly video.
“As we move inevitably toward a converged mobile broadband data world, policy makers will need to find ways to make available more spectrum, in quicker cycles, and in ways that don’t distort the market-based value of the resource, like auction set asides and arbitrary spectrum caps do, but also in ways that don’t negatively impact the creation of the applications, content and services that will be developed by creators and innovators”, the paper continued.
Beyond that however, the auction of spectrum will provide to public policy makers an opportunity to apportion funding, not otherwise available given current economic circumstances, to make public investments in furthering a national digital strategy that would increase Canada’s social, cultural and economic welfare by encouraging the creation, adoption and use of ICTs and, in particular, application and content creation, Telus concluded.
– Lesley Hunter
