

The Web is Like Canada - davesailer
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/canada/

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chaosmachine
Title needs a "(2000)", this was written ten years ago.

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potatolicious
Not sure why you were downvoted - the age of this is relevant. Example:

> _"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.

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mitjak
I'm going to print your comment out and sign it in blood. I'm still shocked I
have a 6GB iPhone data plan that includes tethering. That's a much better deal
than the 20GB cable Internet capped at under 5mbit, p2p traffic shaped, with
inconsistent speeds and service, for more than I'm paying for the tethering
plan.

And don't grt me started on Amazon MP3, Hulu, NBC, Hulu and others being
unavailable. It's like they want me to torrent every single thing over 3G.

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mast
Funny that the author's name was also Joe Clark.

Joe Clark defeated Trudeau to become Prime Minister in 1979, and then lost to
Trudeau in 1980.

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imack
I read the first couple of paragraphs thinking that this was an op-ed by the
former Prime Minister. It wasn't until I came across the word "apeshit" that I
began to wonder.

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chrismendis
This is precisely the historical impact that I would expect Joe Clark to have,
with this sort of sentimental essay. If you have nothing useful to say, then
your ego doesn't justify the fact that you are saying anything.

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rationalbeaver
Enormous but mostly empty?

~~~
Herring
Full of porn?

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dasil003
The days of the web being defined by what it is not are numbered. It's still
new enough that the culture as a whole hasn't yet internalized and defined it,
but certainly young people don't need to make comparisons to any other form of
media. The web has a richness and ubiquity that makes it hard to pin down to a
single definition.

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rubinelli
I hope you don't mind some XKCD, but the difference that immediately comes to
my mind between Canada and the web is this: <http://xkcd.com/180/>

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tomlin
As a Canadian, I wish I could say we're as far ahead as this dated article
allures to.

As it stands today, we have telecommunication (mobile, land, data) rates and
deployment equivalent to third-world countries.

