Ottawa to help finance nationwide sovereign internet network, Carney says
www.theglobeandmail.com
New tax measures announced at PM’s investment summit will lower cost of building fibre-optic cables

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11349801

Archived version

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The federal government of Canada will help to fund “a sovereign broadband backbone that connects Canadians from coast to coast to coast, with more direct and secure links to Europe and Asia,” Prime Minister Mark Carney announced.

A “broadband backbone” is the high-capacity core of the internet network that carries traffic between cities and countries. Speaking with reporters later, Mr. Carney said the backbone would also include connections to the Arctic.

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Representatives for Canada’s major telecom companies supported Mr. Carney’s announcement … As Mr. Carney’s government continues to seek alternatives to reduce dependence on the United States, calls have grown to develop more networking infrastructure that would avoid routing Canadian data through U.S. internet exchanges, thereby exposing that data to potential surveillance.

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Researchers at the University of Toronto and York University studying the journey taken by data between two points in Canada have found that, among their data sets, about a quarter of those journeys routed through American interchanges, exposing that information to access by the U.S. National Security Agency.

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Mr. Carney did not provide further details about the broadband project. However, discussions about the ownership and financing model for the project are currently being held between telecom companies and the Major Projects Office, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter.

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  • wampus@lemmy.caEnglish
    7·
    2 days ago

    So, I seem to recall that early in the trade dispute, the Ford government in Ontario ripped up a Starlink deal they’d been working on, making a big show about not giving them more leverage. The next week, Rogers inked a deal with Starlink to provide satellite peering/connections to their customers, and then the Ontario government could get that service through a “Canadian” telco.

    Point being, I don’t believe a word our government says when it comes to their intentions with regards to detangling from US tech oligarchs, especially when they’re leaning on companies like Bell, Rogers and Telus, which are massively dependent on US tech oligarchs. They’ll “build up” a “sovereign” internet setup, by outsourcing the work to either American companies directly, or to Canadian companies acting as proxies for American companies to spare some optics. Sorta like how “Telus” doen’t actually have Canadian sovereign email, they just resell google or microsoft. Hell, Telus’s VoIP product, “Business Connect”, is just a rebrand of Ring Central. They literally point users to the Ring Central manuals, because our big rich hugely profitable mighty telco, can’t even write/maintain their own branded documentation. Even routes through RC servers down south for most calls.

    It’s also likely worth highlighting that some of those big telcos, like Telus, have like $19.5 billion in long term debt, with a market cap of like $20 billion. There’s talk of big overhauls being required for Telus, as it’s become too outsourced/unfocused, and its debt’s out of control. But hey, Carney just announced a government bailout! Yay, liberal hand outs to big business! Canada foots the bill for the infrastructure, the Telcos get the profits, and it sounds like they’ll get to completely write off taxes for a while too.

    As for people in this thread mentioning things like “Good the US shouldn’t control the internet”, I don’t think they really grasp the state that Canada’s internet is in. There are practically no east west data cables / redundancy around, we just use the US’s backbone most of the time. Almost all of our software reaches south for updates / patches etc, as the US doesn’t put any of those things into Canada, even on proxy boxes – but also, it’s way faster for a server in Vancouver to grab updates from Seattle, than it is to route data to the east coast. This is partly due to our country having crazy bad population distributions, with metropolitan areas like Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal each having more people than entire provinces such as Manitoba and Sask – it’s nearly impossible to justify huge infrastructure spends in communities of like 500-1000 people. At best, this is likely to fill that infrastructure gap a bit – but it won’t change our dependency on US tech in a more practical way.

    It’s been like 2 years+ of this shit, and we still can’t get something like a fairphone through the regular telcos – like 99% of cell phones in Canada are Google or Apple, totally entrenched in those ecosystems. That’s how much the telcos care about Data Sovereignty/Canada.