The Web is Like Canada

> "Convergence is happening faster, and with more dramatic implications for the net, in Canada than anywhere else on earth. We outpace even the United States in this regard, with its richly-financed WebTV and AOLTV experiments."

And yet the situation has reversed. Streaming media in Canada is almost non-existent - it took years for iTunes to show up in the great white north, Pandora, Last.fm do not exist there, nor does Hulu or Netflix (though the latter is about to change). As a Canadian living in the US, the pervasiveness of the internet in our media consumption here is earth-shatteringly far ahead of what we have in Canada.

Canada, at the time of this piece's writing, may have been ahead in its experimentations into the internet. At this point in time though, it is a virtual internet backwater. I lay the blame squarely on archaic protectionist media laws, as well as a thoroughly uncontrolled telecom monopoly worse than the most terrible of American telcos.

Canadians now live in an information backwater - where many innovative forms of media distribution and production are simply not allowed to exist, due to laws originally designed to prevent over-Americanization of our media. Other forms of media are allowed to exist, but cannot because most Canadians, despite having broadband, have onerous bandwidth caps (that are being lowered over time!) that prevents the streaming and constantly-connected lifestyle from proliferating. The traffic-shaping that the ISPs practice (and that the CRTC regulators conveniently overlook), along with the telcos stranglehold over the government (almost all attempts at allowing third party ISPs to compete have failed) do not help matters either. The situation of the internet in Canada is truly dire.