blinkit

Canada and saving the Internet

WMD: A column from May based on an interview with Matt Thompson of Savetheinternet.com. Every time I read another story about the shenanigans of companies like Rogers, I shudder:

Big Internet providers control on-ramps to information highway

Bell, Shaw and Telus well-positioned to dictate shaping of Internet in Canada

Barry Link, Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Imagine ordering a pizza over the phone from the locally owned pizza shop a few blocks away. You try calling but find it takes forever to get a dial tone. Frustrated, you hang up and call the nearest pizza chain and are instantly connected.

Now imagine the next day you learn that the chain corporation cut a deal with Telus to provide super quick phone service, while the local guy, as a much smaller pizza maker with limited funds, refused or could not afford to pay for a similar deal and was given an inferior phone line. As a consumer in search of open and equal pizza choices, you'd be outraged. And so would the local guy.

Of course, this scenario is a fantasy. Anyone of us can order from a small independent pizza place as easily as we can call Dominos or Panagos. But according to Internet defenders like Matt Thompson, this kind of imbalance could soon occur on the Internet thanks to the monopolistic cable and telecommunications companies that now control almost all the on-ramps to what we once called the information highway. In the U.S., giant Internet providers want to charge a premium to web destinations which have the potential for high traffic. Those who pay the premium would be offered a fast lane for Internet users to patronize to their websites and services. Those who don't pay the premium will find their traffic relegated to a second tier of inferior service on a bumpy and winding dirt road.

The issue has become known as net neutrality, which Thompson highlights during a talk Friday at VIDFEST, Vancouver's annual geek gathering of digital new media. The Vancouver-born Montreal resident, a consultant with the U.S.-based SavetheInternet.com campaign, will share the podium with John Perry Barlow, the former Grateful Dead member who co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Net neutrality is a complicated issue to wrap our heads around. We gripe about monthly fees for broadband access, but most of us don't care about the technical workings behind the scenes of the Internet as long as we can poke friends on Facebook and watch cats play piano on YouTube.

But the pizza by phone analogy, which Thompson used when I talked to him last week, is useful to remember. The Internet is as much a key part of modern economic and social life as the telephone, Thompson argues. And just as consumers expect certain rights involving phone usage--such as the ability to easily call any number in the phone book--we should expect the same rights online.

Canadian Internet providers such as Shaw and Telus haven't made noises--yet--about providing premium service to web destinations that can afford to pay. But they are messing with the Internet in other ways. Telus infamously blocked a union website to its subscribers during its last labour dispute--the equivalent of cutting off phone service to the union office. Most providers routinely throttle the connection speeds of users who engage in peer-to-peer file trading. And Bell, a major provider in Eastern Canada, recently admitted slowing down connection speeds for third-party providers that legally lease the use of its network.

In the U.S., similar moves by American providers have sent geeks to virtual barricades. Last year, Thompson produced an award-winning online video that was part of a massive campaign to thwart legislation that favoured the giant Internet providers. The campaign went far beyond geekdom to include hundreds of organizations--from conservative Christian lobby groups to artists--and hundreds of thousands of individuals. That same diverse and powerful coalition has a shot at passing genuine net neutrality legislation in the U.S. in coming months.

But in Canada, net neutrality is an emerging issue at best The CRTC has washed its hands of Internet regulation, and Thompson believes the federal Conservatives will let Bell, Shaw and Telus dictate how the Internet will be shaped in this country.

Thompson, who says the economic importance of net neutrality can't be emphasized enough, notes the Internet was built as an open and equal marketplace. Anyone with an idea--or service, company or political position--has just as much a chance of promoting that idea to the world as anyone else.

Thompson hopes Canadians wake up. We developed a plan for the 19th century railway lines which built the country in its early years, he says. We need to have a similar plan "for the most important invention since the printing press, and the public needs to have a role in that plan," he says. If we don't, better start preparing for limited choice in pizza.

See VIDFEST at www.vidfest.com.

Today's bLINKit: Life getting you down? Learn how to do things to make life better, or at least how to repair your roof or dye wool, at Diylife.com.

'Worse yet'

1. At breakfast I came across three of the German guests, all burly men, sitting at their table in the B&B dining lounge. I said good morning, and they replied in kind, but with such guilty faces that it was like I'd interrupted their secret planning for their next invasion. I'll give the Germans credit though: they're all on a cycling trip, and four of them today rode to Croagh Patrick, climbed it (about a two hour ascent), came down and then went swimming.

2. When I die, I want it to be on Achill Island in the arms of an Irish maid. Preferably two. And she/they will just as likely be Polish or French. "You're a lovely young woman, and I hope you have good luck in Ireland," I said to to the waitress, who told me she was Polish, at a Westport restaurant. "Well, I've been here six years so far, so we'll see," she said. Something like 10 per cent of the population now is non-Irish: mainly foreign workers, most Eastern European, coming in through the EU to fill jobs when the Irish economy vaulted into the stratosphere (it's since come back to Earth). One of my tour guides today at Achill Island was from Germany. She had come here as a tourist, got addicted and decided to stay. I've heard more than a few stories like that here.

3. Spent an hour at Matt Molloy's, reputed to be the best bar for traditional Irish music in Westport. They had music going in two rooms: one with traditional musicians (a flutist and a banjo player) and another with more modern stuff. I sat in the traditional room. "What are you? American?" asked an old man who directed me to my seat when I first made the mistake of sitting in the corner where the musicians play. "Canadian," I replied. "Worse yet," he said and laughed. On my left were a couple from Germany. On my right a trio from England. Before long, a guy from New Jersey on his college graduation trip with a friend sat at our table. "I'm the only one in this bar who's Irish," said the old man. But before that, I met a group of young guys from Kerry -- "from the kingdom" said one,-- and they'd come up to Westport for a stag because one of them was getting married. At first they thought I was very tall and wondered how I fit under the doorway. Then they thought I was American, and when I explained I was Canadian, they asked me: have I been to Niagra Falls, what do I think of New Yorkers, do we have our own government. Most of it was joking. Much of it I couldn't understand. They, and the people I met after, suggest one never need be lonely in a traditional Irish gathering spot.

4. Achill Island: after a six hour tour today, I can confidently say: this is a place to holiday or retire. Relaxed pace of life, friendly people, scenery to take your breath away, excellent broadband.

Into the west

1. The "road" from Galway to Westport is more like a path someone paved over and decided to use for cars. No one told them it would also be used for trucks, buses, two cars passing each other in opposite directions, tractors, pedestrians and sheep. The latter begin to show up right at the side of the road about midway along the journey. They are either the most fearless sheep in Ireland or the dumbest. "Hi there, are you an oncoming mass of metal and glass? Let me have a good look at you!"

2. The route is undeniably scenic: lush farm fields, stony farm fields, stone fences, stone bridges, stone farm houses, guys in yellow vests fixing stone fences, road construction crews, emerald mountains, quaint little villages and B&Bs and even quainter tourist traps.

3. Each village has its own weather system. You go from sunshine, to rain to sun again merely by rounding a corner.

4. Some Germans are watching soccer in the B&B. Germany is winning, barely.

5. Out my B&B window, I can see Croagh Patrick, where St. Patrick apparently spent 40 days and 40 nights (a not very original number) impressing the locals with this devoutness. It's now a pilgrimage site, attracting thousand of Catholics from around the world who scale it in the last week of July. Kind of like a Grouse Grind for the faithful. Archaelogical digs reveal the top of the mountain was a sacred pagan site dating back to the Bronze Age. Pat knew what he was doing.

6. The local Anglican minister (the vast majority of the locals are Catholic, so his congregation is tiny) plays gigs in one of the local pubs on Wednesday nights.

"Give way to the right"

1. Driving in Ireland is easier for North Americans than it seems. "Take 'er easy, give way to the right," advised my taxi driver (London born, returned to the country of his parents) on the way to the rental office. It was good advice. Driving UK-style is like a mirror world: the steering wheel is on the right, the rear view mirror on the left, turn signals on the right, faster traffic on the freeways takes the right lane. Signs are great on the freeways, eccentric everywhere else. Roundabouts are frequent (sometimes you'll get three or four in the space of a mile) and confusing at first but the advice about yielding to the right at roundabouts is invaluable. Less than five minutes after renting my car, I was on the road. It was easy (Dubliners complain about their traffic problem, but it's country driving compared to Vancouver's roadway combat zone), but I also had no idea where I was going, which was interesting. But I finally figured it out, using a map and after taking a long scenic tour south when I should have been going west. It also rained. A lot.

2. Irish men are short.

3. In Ireland, taxi drivers speak English. Unlike in Vancouver.

4. Irish people are easily pleased: "Thanks a million!" said the woman at the highway toll booth. "Thanks a million!" said the cashier at the gas station when I paid for a drink and croissant. "That's grand!" said the woman at the ticket counter at the Guinness Storehouse. Things here are described as being either "fantastic!" or "brilliant!" The ultimate compliment: "That's brilliant! Thanks a million!"

5. Irish dancing is goofy. The dancers look like they're paralyzed by stage fright from the hips up. But it's also athletically and rhythmically impressive, especially when they stop the damn fiddle (one jig and reel sounds much like every other jig or reel) and go right to the tribal drums and feet. Makes you want to paint yourself blue and charge a Norman column.

6. Accents in the west sound like the speaker is comatose or really, really relaxed. And I understand people here even less than in Dublin. "Oh, yes, it's beautiful here mmm hhh mmmm hhhh my mates hhh mmm hhhh had a pint mmm hhhh mmm blue water hhhh mmmm hhhh trees mmm hhhh mmm zzzzzz."

7. Everyone in Ireland has a mobile phone. Everyone texts, constantly. Everyone also has their own website. Free wifi in the cities is easy to find. They're more wired than we are.

Catching up: Zunes to the barricades!

Pic at left: one of hundreds of signs, for and against a recent referendum on further integration with the EU, still up in Dublin. Irish voters said no, and apparently, that's not good for the EU.

WMD: It's taken me two days to learn that: a) my hotel is right across from the building where Oscar Wilde lived and barely two blocks from both the Irish parliament and the birthplace of the Duke of Wellington. For that, you have to walk around, and also swallow your pride and hop on one of the ubiquituous but worthwhile tourist buses that do a continuous circuit of notable points in the city.

WMD 2: Some months ago, Microsoft sent me an advance review copy of its Zune. I mostly liked it, but instead of doing a review, meditated on the revolutionary utility of little machines. That column is here. Text is as follows:

'Little machines' weaponry of brave new world's battlefields

All quiet on Canada's technological front

Barry Link, Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Celebrate, comrades, the Zune is coming to Canada. It's a tiny part of a larger and necessary revolution we all need to join.

The Zune is Microsoft's answer to the iPod, the Apple-produced device that dominates the MP3 player market. I've used a review copy of the Zune for the past month. I like it. The 80-gig harddrive version has an attractive metal casing and a generous 3.5" colour screen. Its interface is clean and smooth, and it ably plays music, videos and pictures. It has a built-in FM radio and syncs wirelessly with your home computer network. The software required for your PC to work with the Zune can only be used with a Zune, but its design is bold and clean.

If I didn't already have a couple of MP3 players I like and use, I'd consider buying a Zune, which Microsoft tells me will be sold in Canada this spring. But its availability north of the 49th parallel comes nearly two years after the first version of the Zune was unveiled in the U.S., and that's a problem.

Canada is becoming a technological backwater. Once we were world leaders in telecommunications, and brave enough three decades ago to try failed experiments like Telidon--a very limited but forward-thinking early kind of Internet. Now we sell off our advanced satellites to the American arms industry and hobble our national space program with lack of funding and vision.

On the consumer level, we're no better. We still don't have iPhones, Apple's revolutionary cellphone and pocket computer, even though they're in widespread use just over the border. Our domestic cellphone companies wrap their fees within incomprehensible pricing plans and charge mobile users ridiculously high rates. Check American websites of consumer retailers and place them alongside the smaller inventories of Canadian retailers. Compared to Asia, Europe or the U.S., we're Sierra Leone when it comes to price and choice in consumer technology. Compared to Sierra Leone, we're Nigeria.

The lack of consumer technology matters. Yes, we're talking about little plastic and metal devices that people use for listening to stolen Aerosmith tunes. But the key social and political battle in the next two decades will not be Senate reform, gas taxes or daycare subsidies. It will be the use of information by governments and corporations to corral and monitor every aspect of our lives. In past years, people resisted such measures with stones and Molotov cocktails. Our weapons of resistance will be the Internet and devices like iPods and Zunes.

These little machines let us fight back. Governments install security cameras on public streets. People use cameras on cellphones to record and place on YouTube the tasering deaths of innocent people by over-zealous police. Governments introduce "enhanced" driver's licences and passports with data chips. People use Facebook--itself the biggest corporate threat to personal privacy in years--to organize anti-war rallies and consumer boycotts.

Millions of people are setting up their own entertainment, news, and information networks and systems through tools such as Bit torrents, blogs and podcasting, the latter of which is a big use for MP3 players like the Zune. It's most obvious in the field of consumer technology itself, where thousands of blogs and audio and video podcasts produced by amateurs and individuals aggressively influence debate and markets. In consumer tech, companies that attempt to cheat consumers pay in bucket loads of bad publicity.

An iPod nano, Sansa player or Nokia smartphone is a funny thing to lift up on the battlements as an instrument of liberation. But we're in a post-AK-47 world. It's now a cliche that personal digital devices have allowed information to filter out of closed societies. Practically the sole source of uncensored images of violence in Tibet this month, and last year in Burma, came from individuals using cellphones and digital cameras.

Zunes and the vast flood of toys in our daily life are problematic, because they are meant to be tossed into landfills once they break, which is frequently. And consumer tech doesn't guarantee democratic resistance. Asia is awash in small computing devices, and yet is an underfed model of democracy.

These tools also come from corporations with little interest in individual liberty. As a recent Wired article pointed out, Apple is notorious for a corporate culture of secrecy and control. But as profit-driven entities, Apple and Microsoft must offer what the market wants. And what the market wants--whether it's privacy protection and continued personal freedom or videos of cats playing piano--is up to us.

Beginner's Dublin

WMD: first hours
1. It has lots of pedestrians.
2. it has little cars
3. dark striped suits worn without ties are in
4. everyone has a mobile phone and must be on it always
5. more people smoke here than in Vancouver -- and they're still allowed to smoke on outdoor public patios
6. Book of Kells at Trinity College is over interpreted: by the time you get to the actual manuscripts, which are cool, you're exhausted (if not bored) by all the interpretive stuff
7. The Long Room at Trinity College, a long library hall of wood and mouldering books, is simply amazing
8. foreign cities are the best places to drink
9. Dubliners walk very fast

Government goes insane on MP3s; raving about The Wire

Today's bLINKit: The federal government wants to give border guards (and police, too) the power to search, without a warrant, your laptop or iPod for copyrighted material. At their discretion, the guards can determine if your copy of "YMCA" on your MP3 player is illegal and have the power to confiscate and/or destroy it and fine you. As if they don't already have enough to do at the border in keeping out terrorists and diseased fruit. The kicker: The government is negotiating these kinds of insane powers in secret.

WMD: In my continuing campaign catch up, I go back to the middle of March, when I penned this ode to The Wire (aka best show ever):

This past Sunday, one of the few reasons to watch TV finished an extraordinary run. The Wire--perhaps the best American television storytelling ever--finished its fifth season, and I am sad. Its absence is enough to make me go back to reading. Or staring at the wall.

I recently upgraded my basic cable television to the full "classic" channel lineup from Shaw. I felt lonely with basic cable, flipping up the channel lineup to hit a ceiling at channel 28 (the handful of French-language and public service channels past 100 don't count, since no one ever watches them). Thanks to my expanded lineup, I can now surf up to channel 57. And what do I get with the extra channels? Every CSI episode ever made. An endless parade of Second World War shows. Guys blowing stuff up. Women trying on dresses. Every Law and Order episode ever made. Chefs swearing. Faded celebrities pretending to be in "reality" shows. Cheesy, made-up documentaries about porn. Every Star Trek episode ever made. I like Star Trek, but that's my own special problem.

Thank God for The Wire. More novel than television, it was one of the few popular forms of art, outside of the films of John Sayles, that tried to tell the story of American society as it really is. With a huge cast and slowly moving and intricately overlapping storyline, its main character was a dysfunctional, socially shattered city. Its lessons: America's institutions--including schools, the police, civic governments and corner drug gangs--stomp on individuals, reward the craven, punish the daring, mock the honest, and make victims of the innocent. All with a large dose of chance and circumstance happening to all. Its other lesson: cops drink a lot.

No one creating TV has loved a city more than the creators of The Wire loved Baltimore. Their fondness was obvious in the use of the city's rich dialect, which when watching DVDs of past seasons, had me using subtitles on occasion to figure out what some of the characters were saying. But now I be with my people. You feel me?

No one doing TV has also done more to lament and chronicle a city's decline. The first season covered the futility of the war on drugs. The second season examined the decline of traditional industry, and the powerlessness of American unions in the face of globalization. The third season imagined a failed experiment in harm reduction, and the fourth instalment took us into the inner city schools, where inflating statistics to increase government funding trumped teaching.

The final season wobbled with its underwritten storyline about the death of American newspapers. But it hit home, powerfully so, with its season long theme of truth and deceit, and how while everyone who holds power knows the truth, deceit is often the more expedient route as large, self-serving insitutions rumble and jockey for position and grind up people between them. For many, lying is the enriching choice.

Few shows have dealt directly with the constant institutional lying that marks modern urban life, and perhaps make it possible.

The dialogue in Sunday's finale tells it best.

"I always wondered if they'd get their shit together," says one character after he expresses surprise at how long it took authorities to uncover his corruption. "But that's Baltimore, isn't it."

And this from a lawyer when her career is on the line, and her superiors have the upper hand: "You know the weight will not fall on them. It never does."

Or this from a drug dealer, pointing a gun to a rival's head: "There ain't no nostalgia to this. There's just the street, and the game, and what happened here today."

And finally, from the city editor of the ficticiously rendered Baltimore Sun newspaper, which features prominently in the final season: "I remember clean." The silent smile on a colleague's face said it all.

The Wire was created by a former journalist and a former cop-turned-teacher, all professions which have both a public service component and systemic pressures that compete with the ability to perform public service. The one legacy of the brilliant, and often very funny show they created can be boiled down to this: Do you tell the truth about the system, or do you go along, telling yourself you'll do the best you can in the circumstances. In the two-hour finale, one constant refrain was heard from various characters as they did a careful dance with truth and power: "Keep my name out of it."

If you live or work in Vancouver, or just about any city anywhere, you've heard that line before.

Summer begins now

WMD: It's still a little less than a month away, but I declare summer to be officially under way in this week's column. Text follows here:

Sitting on my deck last weekend, I had a brief glimpse of summer. It can't come fast enough.

We suffered a long winter in Vancouver. It wasn't particularly cold or snowier than usual, but it was interminably grey, with one sunless day following another. Spring came almost unnoticed with more grey--and a last fit of snow--overshadowing the annual bloom of our cherry trees.

This past winter also brought to me more work than usual, with more stress at our workplace than usual, which is why last weekend was my first two free days this year that coincided with sunshine and warm temperatures. Waking up Saturday morning, blinking at the light like a survivor of a planetary holocaust emerging from his bunker, I finally felt the season change. I leapt past our limp spring and right to summer.

I sat for hours on my deck. Ate meals there. Drank beer. Read at length a real book. And watched people go by on my street. It felt almost like childhood, except for the beer.

A few columns back, I described the endless days of my childhood summers. I equated it then to a freer time in our society, but that adolescent sense of eternity also had as much to do with summer itself. Summer is about long light and unrushed days, of heat and dreamy reflection. In December, we eat too much, drink more than is sensible, rarely get exercise, shiver through commutes in darkness, rain and snow, and plunge into overcrowded, chaotic malls to spend far too much money on our holiday rituals. In July, we take afternoon naps in the shade.

We open our windows wide in summer, and ignore the thermostat until October. We go outside and rediscover outdoor spaces that in winter's cold would have been dangerous to our health. We clean up our patios and decks, liberate our lawns and gardens from debris, plant food and celebrate being alive with flowering plants.

Echoing our distant savannah ancestors who invented the first barbecue, we cook outside and share meals in the open air with family and friends. We venture into the parks and onto the beaches and let our bare feet feel the direct touch of grass and sand. We let our children run and yell and make only token efforts to rein them in. We fill the walking trails and bike routes and try not to notice the bickering between dog owners and the people they annoy. In winter, strangers appearing in the dark of the night give us pause. On a summer's night, off-leash dogs, the odd beach stabbing or a riot on a fireworks night not withstanding, the same strangers might be an occasion for a chat.

If we're brave, we hit the ocean water and let the salty coolness wash over our bodies. We swim, sail and surf. Or we lie on the sand and pretend we've done all three.

We lose our clothes in summer, and in a supposedly casual city that remains hung up on ancient Anglo-Saxon guilt, newly restrained by an Asian sense of propriety, such freedom cannot be underestimated. We bundle up in winter, and because this is Vancouver we do our best to appear hip but end up looking like fashionably dressed astronauts. In summer all pretense is lost. The dress of the day is shirts or light tops, shorts or skirts and sandals. Repeat throughout the week.

The shedding of clothing is also when we realize how beautiful so many of our citizens can be. Yes, some of us should remain hidden, swathed in layers of fabric to prevent the rest of us from spitting up our coffee. But so many others, of all ages and both genders, are blessed. On sunny days, in shopping districts like South Granville, the girls of summer come out in flocks, lightly clothed and strolling unselfconscious in their loveliness. Ordinarily sober, serious columnists innocently lounging at sidewalk cafes suddenly lose their train of thought in mid...

And we read. I used to think the long-standing tradition of reading in summer was a bourgeois indulgence propped up by boring newspaper features about what books local celebrities are taking to the "cottage." But now I understand why people choose summer for reading. There's plenty of natural light, you can read outside anywhere you can throw down a blanket and cooler, and because you've worked throughout the winter in confined spaces to escape the dark and cold, books are needed to rekindle the soul. Television doesn't feel right in summer. Movies become more mindless than usual after Victoria Day weekend. Books are what save us. Live music, too.

Summer officially starts in a little under a month. It ends too soon. I started mine early, and despite the return of grey clouds this week, it's not going to stop until it absolutely has to--perhaps in mid-November.

Today's bLINKit: If real life were like Second Life, a video.

Suffer the children

WMD: Column from mid-April: The evil that is summer school. Text follows:

Summer classes stifle children's right to run free

Blue sky days with nothing to do not in cards for kids of today's competitive parents

Barry Link, Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Thank you, Vancouver School Board, for helping to kill childhood.

The Courier reported last week that the school district will not charge fees for most of its summer courses. That's good for students who repeat courses because they failed them during the regular part of the year and need a do over. But for many citizens of Vancouver from ages five to 18, this is potentially bad, because too many parents are nuts.

The move to free summer courses was forced on the school district by the Ministry of Education, which in turn was compelled by a Supreme Court of B.C. decision in 2006 declaring fees for public school courses to be illegal. That decision came from a suit by a Victoria school trustee who rightly wanted to eliminate school fees of any kind because they create a two-tier system of education in which students from poor families are shut out of courses that require money for equipment or materials.

Offering summer courses for "free" (in reality, they're paid for through our taxes) will cost the district $2.2 million a year. Officially, it's a hit to the district budget. Unofficially, the district is overjoyed, as the hiply named Laurie Anderson, an associate superintendent, revealed. "We're encouraged by this because it allows us to provide students with the opportunity [to take classes]," he told the Courier last week. "We have the capacity obviously--we have lots of schools."

Bureaucrats hate unused capacity, even in summer. And more summer students strengthens the public school system's social role as warehouses for non-adults.

Schools are vital as civilizing institutions. Education should be our biggest financial investment. Teachers deserve to be well paid. But in truth, we lock up children and teens in schools because we haven't figured out anything more imaginative to do with them. They scare us. They're loud, they move too fast and would spawn babies at 14 if we didn't put a leash on them. So we lie to them by warning that if they don't go to school five days a week, the sun will explode.

That longstanding tradition of imprisoning children 10 months of the year worked for years because we let them out every summer. Originally, the annual furlough allowed kids to work family farms and bring in the harvest. The country got fed. But gradually, when we learned that we could get our food at the local Safeway and that Farmer Brown largely depended on immigrant labour, summer became prime time to be a kid.

I was a child in the '60s and '70s, and yes, it was a simpler, dumber time. We rode mastodons then and wore furs. And oh how we marvelled at the invention of fire. But I was also--and I believe myself extremely lucky--part of the last generation of North American kids allowed to run free. Summer was summer, with school a distant memory. Sometimes I went to camp or went on trips with my family, and as I got older, I took on summer jobs. But much of the time I did very little. It was bliss. When you're an 11-year-old boy, and your time is your own, a summer day of high heat and a cloudless blue sky seems like it can last for decades. For anyone past 30, contrast that childhood and even teenage sense of eternity with your life now, when a decade slips by as if it were a day.

Contrast also my quaint experience of childhood as unstructured and self-organizing with today's child, whose typical day resembles a spreadsheet of prescribed activities performed in highly guarded environments. Unfettered as children, my generation became parents and turned childhood for our own kids into a lesson plan. Even play became a teachable moment.

We've also increasingly refashioned our culture along social Darwinist lines, which is why summer for many parents cannot be allowed to fall into mere fun. Their kids are being raised to compete, and competition for a finite number of university placements means summer school for prep courses or to redo courses taken in the regular year to get higher grades. Free summer courses for them is mana from a heaven of extreme parenting. Their urge to compete through their children, and our relentless drive for efficiency, are also behind the concept of year-round schooling, as anti-child (or teenager) as any educational concept going.

Such thinking forgets the cycle of life. You are young, you play. You get old and then you die. Do not repeat. There's a saying that no person on their deathbed wishes they'd spent more time at the office. The same applies to the classroom.

Why our culture changed is a puzzle. But this much is true: we were kids once, and then we forgot.

Get a free laptop, beware the giant IPs

Today's bLINKit: Get a free Eee PC (cheap, but robust and widely praised mini-laptop) at RBC by opening an account there. Switching banks is actually a lot of work, and I have no idea if RBC is a better or worse bank the others, so it's worth nothing that the machine RBC is giving away is going for $299 at The Source.

WMD: Continuing with Courier columns, this one published yesterday:

Big Internet providers control on-ramps to information highway

Bell, Shaw and Telus well-positioned to dictate shaping of Internet in Canada

Barry Link, Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Imagine ordering a pizza over the phone from the locally owned pizza shop a few blocks away. You try calling but find it takes forever to get a dial tone. Frustrated, you hang up and call the nearest pizza chain and are instantly connected.

Now imagine the next day you learn that the chain corporation cut a deal with Telus to provide super quick phone service, while the local guy, as a much smaller pizza maker with limited funds, refused or could not afford to pay for a similar deal and was given an inferior phone line. As a consumer in search of open and equal pizza choices, you'd be outraged. And so would the local guy.

Of course, this scenario is a fantasy. Anyone of us can order from a small independent pizza place as easily as we can call Dominos or Panagos. But according to Internet defenders like Matt Thompson, this kind of imbalance could soon occur on the Internet thanks to the monopolistic cable and telecommunications companies that now control almost all the on-ramps to what we once called the information highway. In the U.S., giant Internet providers want to charge a premium to web destinations which have the potential for high traffic. Those who pay the premium would be offered a fast lane for Internet users to patronize to their websites and services. Those who don't pay the premium will find their traffic relegated to a second tier of inferior service on a bumpy and winding dirt road.

The issue has become known as net neutrality, which Thompson highlights during a talk Friday at VIDFEST, Vancouver's annual geek gathering of digital new media. The Vancouver-born Montreal resident, a consultant with the U.S.-based SavetheInternet.com campaign, will share the podium with John Perry Barlow, the former Grateful Dead member who co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Net neutrality is a complicated issue to wrap our heads around. We gripe about monthly fees for broadband access, but most of us don't care about the technical workings behind the scenes of the Internet as long as we can poke friends on Facebook and watch cats play piano on YouTube.

But the pizza by phone analogy, which Thompson used when I talked to him last week, is useful to remember. The Internet is as much a key part of modern economic and social life as the telephone, Thompson argues. And just as consumers expect certain rights involving phone usage--such as the ability to easily call any number in the phone book--we should expect the same rights online.

Canadian Internet providers such as Shaw and Telus haven't made noises--yet--about providing premium service to web destinations that can afford to pay. But they are messing with the Internet in other ways. Telus infamously blocked a union website to its subscribers during its last labour dispute--the equivalent of cutting off phone service to the union office. Most providers routinely throttle the connection speeds of users who engage in peer-to-peer file trading. And Bell, a major provider in Eastern Canada, recently admitted slowing down connection speeds for third-party providers that legally lease the use of its network.

In the U.S., similar moves by American providers have sent geeks to virtual barricades. Last year, Thompson produced an award-winning online video that was part of a massive campaign to thwart legislation that favoured the giant Internet providers. The campaign went far beyond geekdom to include hundreds of organizations--from conservative Christian lobby groups to artists--and hundreds of thousands of individuals. That same diverse and powerful coalition has a shot at passing genuine net neutrality legislation in the U.S. in coming months.

But in Canada, net neutrality is an emerging issue at best The CRTC has washed its hands of Internet regulation, and Thompson believes the federal Conservatives will let Bell, Shaw and Telus dictate how the Internet will be shaped in this country.

Thompson, who says the economic importance of net neutrality can't be emphasized enough, notes the Internet was built as an open and equal marketplace. Anyone with an idea--or service, company or political position--has just as much a chance of promoting that idea to the world as anyone else.

Thompson hopes Canadians wake up. We developed a plan for the 19th century railway lines which built the country in its early years, he says. We need to have a similar plan "for the most important invention since the printing press, and the public needs to have a role in that plan," he says. If we don't, better start preparing for limited choice in pizza.

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