Canada's Worst-in-Class Internet Plans

Canada is a pretty good country to live in. We have a high standard of living, a decent educational and medical system, and a reasonably stable political system. It's a nice place to be if you can stand the winters and don't mind paying some of the world's highest prices for mobile internet access. 

And if the government has its way, we may have one of the most controlled internet access, comparable to China and other totalitarian states, all in the name of protecting us from "harmful content". 

In a Medium article, Cory Doctorow, rips into the government's current plans.

• A requirement to remove “lawful-but-awful” speech that is allowed under Canadian law, but effectively also now banned under Canadian law;
• 24-hour deadlines for removal, guaranteeing that platforms will not have time to conduct a thorough analysis of speech before it is censored;
• A de-facto requirement for platforms to install algorithmic filters to (mis)identify and remove prohibited expression;
• Huge penalties for failing to remove banned speech — and no penalties for erroneously taking down permitted speech — which guarantees that platforms will shoot first and probably not bother to ask questions later;
• Mandatory reporting of potentially harmful content (and the users who post it) to law enforcement and national security agencies;
• A Chinese-style national firewall that will block websites that refuse to comply;
• Far-reaching data-retention policies that only the largest companies will be able to afford, which will create immortal, leaky repositories of kompromat on every Canadian internet user.

This is truly awful stuff, mostly unenforceable in practice, and which will leave Canadians wide open to abuse by corporations and governments. I've seen very little notice of this in Canadian mainstream media. I'm definitely going to have to pay more attention to what's going on.