Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Pogge rightly calls out the "supportive stakeholders" who are eagerly giving up any credibility in order to serve as spokesflacks for the Harper Cons:

At least three major business organizations -- the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and the Canadian Trucking Alliance -- quickly issued statements praising the framework agreement Friday.

So these three groups aren't just self-interested lobby groups. They're quite happy to collude with the Conservatives to keep secrets from us. That pretty much confirms their willingness to be dishonest in their dealings with the Canadian public and eliminates any credibility they may have left. Don't be surprised to see me link back to this post any time that John Manley of the CCCE or Perrin Beatty of the Chamber of Commerce open their mouths in public. I'll assume from now on that any public statements they make are part of another conspiracy to deceive us.

- For all the justified criticisms of the Cons' plan to axe per-vote party funding, I don't see much reason to think Nik Nanos is right in theorizing that the result would be a two-party system. Instead, based on the historical information which Alice has already assembled, the main effect would look to be a very slight expansion of all of the current gaps between the national federal parties - which is much of the reason why I don't see it making sense for any of the opposition parties to go along with the plan unless it's more focused on fighting off the parties in the rear-view mirror than trying to advance its standing.

- Shorter Sun editorial: we must prove our independence from the U.S. by taking its orders to buy F-35s!

- Though in fairness, the Cons' stubbornness is at least resulting in some winners in Canada.

- Finally, David Beers points out one of the largest problems with the current usage-based billing debate:

This week, we heard small Internet service providers say that what the big telecoms want to charge for “extra” gigabytes used is 10, even 100 times more than the actual cost. Big telecoms also have other motivations to discourage you from downloading Netflix – by charging a lot, they can then offer a discount on their own movie download products. Or nudge you back to their broadcast television properties.

So how much is too much to charge? Sadly, as we’ve learned, the CRTC itself can only base its decisions on cost estimates provided by the big telecoms, because there is so little independent auditing in this area. We won’t know until what a Globe and Mail editorial called the “black box” of Internet infrastructure costs is opened to public view. Then maybe we’ll know why South Koreans pay a fraction of the cost for 10 times the bandwidth we get here.
...
The very way in which we address these issues needs profound reform, to be opened to the light of debate and scrutiny. Until then, the regulators of Canada’s digital future have lost the public trust.