The Link (Concordia University)

MONTREAL (CUP) – When Cory Doctorow talks, the Internet listens.

Doctorow is a co-editor at Boing Boing, a blog with a higher weekly readership than the Globe and Mail. He’s also a prolific author who makes all his books available for free download, including Little Brother, a dystopian young adult novel that spent six weeks on the New York Times children’s bestseller list. Additionally, he’s a crusader for fair copyright, equal access to the Internet and the right to privacy.

Major access barriers on the Internet include network caps, the upload and download limits imposed by Internet service providers. According to Doctorow, those caps are bad for the economy.

“It punishes experimentation because you have to ration your network use. What this does is undermine entrepreneurship,” he said.

Although not reserved to Canada, the problem is so serious in this country that Toronto-born, London-based Doctorow once wrote that it was subpar Internet that would prevent him from moving back.

“Canada is really lagging among [nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] in access, speed, cost and equality,” he said. Doctorow pointed to Internet speeds in nations like South Korea, which are four times faster than those in Canada.

Doctorow blamed the problem on the lack of competition in the Canadian telecommunications industry.

“Somewhere out there,” said Doctorow, “there’s an entrepreneur who wants to provide the network that Canada deserves.”

The Internet isn’t the only thing Doctorow sees going wrong in Canada. He foresees problems with the enhanced driver’s licences, currently being rolled out in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia. Those licences are heavily reliant on biometric identification, such as fingerprints.

“Fingerprints leak like crazy. How many surfaces do you think you left your fingerprints on today?” he asked.

Copying fingerprints is also easy. Doctorow recalled an event in March 2008 when a German hacker group released the fingerprint of German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble to protest biometric passports.

Enhanced Driver’s Licenses are being adopted in order to comply with newly created American regulations on what constitutes an acceptable document for crossing the border.

“If all the other G20 nations were jumping off western democracy and landing in a boiling pit of fascism, would you jump with them? That’s not a basis for good governance.”

But Doctorow has hope for the future of information policy.

“I would like to see a kind of information bill of rights that mirrored the UN Declaration of Human Rights and that was widely accepted as kind of rote by people, where you didn’t have to explain why privacy is important or why neutral networks are important,” said Doctorow.

Doctorow is currently on a North American tour for Makers, his latest novel. It’s freely available for download in a variety of formats from craphound.com/makers.

Published in Volume 64, Number 13 of The Uniter (November 26, 2009)