Stories from Abroad

Rogers Communications has agreed to buy Shaw Communications for about 20 billion Canadian dollars, equivalent to roughly $16 billion. The deal, which would remove Canada’s fourth-largest wireless provider from a thin competitive arena, will be scrutinized by three federal government agencies, including the competition bureau, the Canadian telecommunications regulator and the department of industry. Innovation, Science and Industry minister François-Philippe Champagne said in a statement that the government would focus on affordability, competition, and innovation in its analysis of the deal

Within the growing literature on broadband development, much research has focused on infrastructure competition and spatial effects driving investment incentives in broadband provision. However, less attention has been paid to the geographical factors explaining very high capacity fibre based network rollout.

The residents of Thursday Island, a speck on the archipelago Torres Strait Islands, have relied for years on Facebook to learn of everything from cyclone warnings to crayfish prices. The platform doesn’t eat up data the way other websites do, a priority for the remote communities, where people often use prepaid phones. Newspapers and radio stations with staffs made up of indigenous reporters publish Facebook updates in local dialects—a critical feature for those for whom English is a third or fourth language. It’s as real-time as the island can get.

Facebook said it would spend at least $1 billion to license material from news publishers over the next three years, a pledge that comes as tech giants face scrutiny from governments around the world over paying for news content that appears on their platforms. The spending plans are in addition to $600 million that Facebook paid since 2018 in deals with publishers like the Guardian, Financial Times and others to populate its Facebook News product in some countries.

Facebook will walk back its block on Australian users sharing news on its site after the government there agreed to make amendments to the proposed media bargaining laws that would force major tech giants to pay news outlets for their content. The code is structured so that if Facebook and Google do not sign commercial deals with traditional media outlets the Treasurer can "designate" them, and force them to pay for access to news content. The government promised to make further amendments to the code, including giving Facebook more time to strike those deals.

Each country has its own car safety regulations and tax codes. But should every country also decide its own bounds for appropriate online expression? We probably don’t want internet companies deciding on the freedoms of billions of people, but we may not want governments to have unquestioned authority, either. Regulating online expression in any single country — let alone in the world — is a messy set of trade offs with no easy solutions. Let us lay out some of the issues:

No one would deny that Internet access has dramatically improved across much of Cuba in the last decade. But everyday Cubans without regular access to reliable Internet still struggle. The 1,095 public Wi-Fi hotspots across Cuba serve as a vital resource to connect the largest island in the Caribbean with the rest of the world. Of the various ways Cubans connect to the Internet, Wi-Fi hotspots continue to be the most popular method. It is worth noting, however, the number of Cubans who must rely on public Wi-Fi hotspots as their primary (or singular) option is dwindling.

Where there’s a coup, there will probably be an internet outage. At least 35 countries have restricted access to the internet or social media platforms at least once since 2019, according to Netblocks, a group which tracks internet freedom.

Russia asked the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to have the group’s 193 member states “discuss the status of global governance system for … Internet domain names, addresses, and critical Internet infrastructure.” In a curt statement, the ITU said simply that it had “noted the contribution” of Russia.

As of the end of 2019, 46.4% of the world's population does not have regular access to the Internet. Bringing the more than 3.5 billion individuals still unconnected online is the primary goal for multiple international organizations, including the ITU and the UN Broadband Commission. Two important barriers that restrict connectivity are the lack of infrastructure and affordability.