Facebook and Google Tighten Grip Over US Digital Ad Market
In response to a recent post by Stephanie concerning findings on mobile carriers stifling certain apps and content, I am posting an article I recently read concerning Facebook and Google’s dominance on Ads. More often than not one will be searching something on googling and on Facebook an advertisement referring to the searched item will […]
Regulation of Social Media Companies
Tomorrow I will talk in my class presentation about whether and how social media should be regulated. Some of the most important concerns in this area revolve around the issues of free speech, democracy and censorship. A number of European countries have debated and enacted certain provisions which go some way to ‘regulating’ or ‘censoring’ […]
Are mobile carriers violating net neutrality?
Stumbled across this article regarding a new app that analyzes data on how mobile carriers stifle certain apps/content/etc. An interesting read and video! https://news.vice.com/en_ca/article/8xd4dg/are-mobile-carriers-already-violating-net-neutrality
Question of the Week (Class 6) & Class 6 Poll: How did you watch the Super Bowl (or not)?
The background for this week’s “all in one” question of the week has previously been set out in the posts above. Additions of note are that the CRTC issued a guide to watch the Super bowl this past Thursday February 1, 2018; a TorStar from the following day reporting on the current state of affairs; […]
Class 5 Slides
Slides from today can be found here, with a few additions.As promised I’ve added some slides on the Sega TV saga – the game download service from 1995 that the CRTC considered licensing. As well, in the context of the Hush-A-Phone device that arguably laid the groundwork for breaking up the Bell monopoly in the […]
FAKE NEWS
An unavoidable cost for the furtherance of Facebook’s advertising dominance? Frankly speaking, Facebook has been on the receiving end of a lot of flack from Congress, world media, and the occasional law student for their (unintentional?) propagation of deliberately false information during the 2016 US election cycle and all of the claims of foreign meddling […]
Question of the Week (Class 5): Will the “Singularity” be achieved by the year 2065?
The Singularity (AKA) the technological singularity is defined by Wikipedia as “the hypothesis that the invention of artificial superintelligence will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization. According to this hypothesis, an upgradable intelligent agent (such as a computer running software-based artificial general intelligence) would enter a “runaway reaction” of self-improvement cycles, with each […]
News of the Week; January 24, 2018
MEDIA, COMMUNICATIONS & NET NEUTRALITY Bell Canada, et al. v. Attorney General of Canada (Motion to Stay CRTC Decision Denied, January 24, 2018) Vice’s Canadian cable TV channel is going off the air, after low ratings and reported losses for the $100 million joint venture Mozilla, Consumer Groups Sue The FCC For Its Attack On […]
Legislative “should”s
Last week we touch on the seemingly unusual wording of section 3(1) of the Broadcasting Act which contains the word should in several critical places. One specific issue we touch on was the potential for subsection (g): (the programming originated by broadcasting undertakings should be of high standard;) to be used to regulate the fake […]
