> Odd how 'free trade' doesn't apply to consumers. Are they not allowed to import digital goods?

Bell doesn't want free trade on the business side, either. They are part of an oligopoly that is protected from foreign competition by laws on Canadian media ownership. Media and cultural industries were exceptions to both the NAFTA agreement and the newer USMCA agreement.

Bell’s all for cheaper networking gear though.

Their nationwide 3G network (which they split the build cost with one of their “competitors”) was built by Huawei and Nokia.

Even if they’re not currently buying Huawei gear, they still benefit from a formidable competitor for a supplier..

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/bell-teams-up-wit...

It is usually how these things work. The human engaging in arbitrage is a crime or something a corporation cries foul over. A corporation, or sometimes just a rich human, doing it is "just good business".

uhh... you're missing a critical part of that equation which is government/private influence. A private corporation can't "ban" VPNs and encryption without a huge backlash from their retail customer base and the corporate entities which depend on their networks and the full lobbying might of all tech businesses in general which profit from a healthy free internet.

The only way this would work is via unilateral gov policy, which in recent years are common in mega-trade deals (as some politicians have called it the "gold standard" of state/capitalist countries policy), and which is exactly why Bell never tried to do it privately themselves.

Much like the majority of the worst examples of major corporate abuses in the paste few decades they have almost always been businesses who are close friends with government. Often in the most heavily regulated industries: telecom/ISPs, pharma [1], finance [no citation needed, see post-2008 policies which crippled small-bank competition and reduced the market to 5 mega-banks], and energy - as we've seen recently with PG&E in California:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-politicians-direct-capital...

Despite rhetoric about "corporate greed" causing the PG&E safety lapses, the California government has played a massive role in controlling PG&E's capital expenditure and safety policy for two decades (including giving them a free pass from any market-consequences after a similar fire in 2017) AND they already charge the highest per person energy costs in the entire country.

Given that forced mandate PG&E simply couldn't have afforded the money on those massive safety improvements even if they wanted to (without further burden on tax payers), they were already pushing their customers to the max via state influenced spending policies on climate change tech. Plus what incentive did they have when they had 1500 other incidents and their friends in gov repeatedly gave them a free pass?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical...

This narrative fashions PG&E as victims when they are the criminals here. Please have a look at Judge Alsup's early comments here [1].

The regulatory framework was compromised by lobbying and the usual problems like ex PG&E execs in regulatory positions so there was no oversight. This is not a problem of government but corrupt compromised 'business friendly' governance enabled by the twin evils of regulatory capture and corruption which we have seen replicated in all industries.

The idea that without governance these companies would behave themselves is some kind of mythical fantasy completely disconnected from the real world and a long catalogued history of self serving greed driven behavior. No business is under obligation to behave unethically to make money.

[1] https://apnews.com/e297eb8082294ee19588a05cd87670ec

Of course PG&E is not the victim, they should have suffered the consequences of their negligence long ago. Consequences which they are finally facing today after the political protection they've been offered for decades is no longer viable - aka easily hidden in exchange for backroom deals with the state.

No company could have survived the 1500 safety lapses PG&E made without significant changes via legitimately confronting the liability normal private companies face without massive intervention by government (aka the securitization of liabilities which get pushed onto California consumers which is why they pay the highest rates in the country).

There are countless examples where PG&E was given a free pass by the local governments in the name of keeping the status quo, including executives/board smartly making politically-friendly climate policy compromises to keep on their good side in exchange for protection from any real liability.

When you get compromises from private entities in exchange for free-passes for prior negligence you only get bigger and bigger failures... which is exactly what happened. In the past the smaller compromises were easier to hide, but they consistently were getting worse (this isn't even the first bankruptcy). PG&E has never been held fully accountable as any non-well politically connected company would.

Finally, the gov "keeping the power on" excuse still had plenty of options that don't include avoiding massive restructuring or total bankruptcy/destruction of the negligent parties. Better, more responsible, companies should have took over long ago. But that doesn't happen in state heavy economic systems where political favours are preferred over markets as it is in California, just like it doesn't happen in other more obvious negligent countries like Russia and China. When politically connected companies always survive regardless of behaviour then consumers and the public always lose. Period.

>> Bell argued that Canadians accessing content from a US service with a VPN “unjustly enriches the US service, which has not paid for the Canadian rights”

I see something else weird. Why would a Canadian politician care about this? You don't buy Canadian distribution rights from Canada or from any Canadian entity. You buy them from the copyright holder.

If I'm an American tourist in Canada and I want to watch Moana on my Netflix account, and I do that by tunneling back to my home computer and appearing to be located in the US, then Netflix is inappropriately delivering me content that they gave Disney money for the right to distribute within the US. But if they also needed to buy the right to distribute it in Canada... they'd give that money to Disney too. Why does Canada need Netflix to give more money to an American company?

> Why would a Canadian politician care about this? You don't buy Canadian distribution rights from Canada or from any Canadian entity. You buy them from the copyright holder.

Because the Canadian company paid for exclusive access to that content within Canada for the purpose of making profit. This generates tax revenue and employment and increases the value fo the company for the shareholders, things politicians care about to various degrees.

1. Company buys something that doesn’t exist.

2. Company lobbies government to demand that their something must be made to exist.

Genius.

Many times the content is never made available to Canadians! It’s quite frustrating because we want to their content but there is no legal way.

There's an upside to that, as buying that content would finance more of this kind of anti-consumer lobbying.

FWIW, Bell's argument is completely silly, because typically when I see people doing this, it's to get access to TV shows that they wouldn't otherwise be able to at all.

Its not a free trade issue, its a matter of contractual distribution agreements with geographical limitations. That's pretty common in many industries, not just those dealing in digital goods.

The consumer never agreed to those contracts. He bought the goods in the US, and imported them into Canada, via a VPN. He could just as well have driven across the border, bought a DVD, and carried it back.

DVDs have region locking. The United States and Canada happen to be in the same region, and there are bypasses, but technical controls against importing digital goods are already normalized, and I doubt this analogy will convince policymakers.

This is irrelevant. Replace DVD with an apple. The point is that free trade between countries means you should be able to buy in one country and use in the other country.

The policymakers can be safely assumed to be hostile on this anyway (usually because they're bought by the lobbyists). The goal, therefore, is to throw them out and replace them with ones that are not, not to convince them. Convincing is for the voters to do that.

DVD region locking isn't much of a "technical control". There are 8 regions, because that's the number of bits in a byte. The region lock is a single byte that specifies which regions are intended to read the disc. On the honor system, a DVD player is supposed to read this byte, check the bit for its region, and refuse to play the disc if the bit is unset.

The only "control" here is that it's assumed you don't have a copy of the DVD spec and don't realize what the lock consists of. Ignoring it suffices to bypass it.

>technical controls against importing digital goods are already normalized

then why is bell canada whining about VPNs, if they're normal and accepted?

Sounds like Bell doesn't really want to offer IP services. They should just pivot their business to work on a proprietary system they have 100% control over. Maybe resurrect OSI and convince Canadians it's better.