Canada’s telecom oligopoly is a major national security risk

On the morning of July 8th, 2022, a third of Canadians woke up to discover they had no access to internet or cell service. A misconfiguration done during routine maintenance quite literally brought the entire network to its knees. One which wasn’t fixed until late in the evening. This is a huge, festering problem, largely created by the Canadian government, that poses a significant threat to national security.

Now, for the record, I am not a Rogers customer, and have done work for their competitors. So take that for what you will in the interest of full disclosure. Fortunately, I didn’t experience any outages, except my work provided cell. Which is certainly not something I’m going to cry about. But that was not the case for many Canadians living in significant urban centres. For a better rundown of what actually went wrong, I suggest watching Muta’s video. But this whole diarrhea typhoon really highlighted just how fragile our internet infrastructure really is.

Since many banks and retailers rely on Rogers services to handle transactions, manywere unable to process sales. Signs at shops stated that they were accepting cash only, since many no longer have the necessary tools (those swipey machines with the carbon paper) to handle offline credit card transactions. Given that so many have stopped carrying cash in recent years, especially during the CCPVirus pandemic, this posed a major conundrum for those desperately trying to buy their caffeinated brown toilet water from the local Tim’s. And it’s not like those customers could just stop at the ATM or branch teller to pick up some yuppie food stamps, as many major banks also rely on Rogers’ network to communicate with their central servers. Obviously this resulted in a significant amount of lost commerce. There’s also been reports of issues with 911 services.

I don’t think it takes an IT security genius to realize how bad this was. Over the past two decades, and especially in the last two year, the internet has moved from a first world luxury to a critical piece of national infrastructure. On par with the electric grid, gas stations, or the telephone system. Without internet access, the modern world does not function. So many Canadians are now asking how this was allowed to happen. How can a single misconfiguration result in a third of the nation being brought to its knees? Why is there no redundancy? Why hasn’t the Federal Government, who regulates the telecom industry, not been taking steps to prevent these incidents? As it’s certainly far from the first time where Rogers or a major telecom has lost all service. Though this is probably the worst in recent memory.

It’s easy to point fingers at Rogers. And let me be clear, they are 100% responsible for this outage. However, the Canadian Government has allowed a system to develop where three major telecom companies control the majority of the market. Not only that, but the government has encouraged this to continue, with very little oversight, while failing to ensure reliability and security standards are met.

Now, back towards the beginning of the last decade, the Harper Conservative government did try and break the telecom monopoly by making it easier for small players to entre the market. However, these players piggyback off the big boy’s networks. Essentially, the major telecoms are required by law to re-sell chunks of bandwidth to third parties. This was done because setting up physical network infrastructure requires substantial capital investment. Which small players frankly cannot afford. Hence why these natural monopolies developed in the first place. Today’s big ISPs were already big telephone and cable TV providers, and only they had the funding to run the miles of copper and fibre needed. Heck, even in the early days of the Internet, most small ISPs were piggybacking off the existing telephone system.

Now, the major telecoms absolutely hate this deal, because they’d prefer to have those people as their customers, rather than to sell that bandwidth at a cut rate to some cowboy ISP. They’ve been pushing hard to eliminate it. Which hasn’t been too successful, but the CRTC has generally taken a softer stance, and opened up more funding to big companies in recent years. You’ll notice media outlets like CTV and CITY TV show significant bias towards the Trudeau government, while being hostile towards the Federal Conservatives, and this is likely why. They know who butters their bread. And that butter has typically come from the Liberal Party, who tends to be very much pro-big business. More so than even the Neocons running the CPC. Though let me be clear here that no political faction within the country has clean hands when it comes to this issue.

The Canadian Government, along with the CRTC, created the telecom monopolies in the first place, and continues to prop them up. The public gets the occasional bone thrown their way when they complain about sky high telecom rates. However, the government continues to ensure that the three major companies keep their regional monopolies, and that no potential competitors are allowed to get too big. And they continue to allow the big boys to get away with blue murder despite a growing list of consumer complaints and major incidents like this. The amount of corporate cronyism that goes on within the Canadian Federal Government would make even the United States blush. Yet nobody talks about it. This, quite frankly, needs to change. Because if one simple bit of bad code, within some big telecom monopoly, can cripple a big chunk of the national economy for a day, what’s stopping a rogue actor from doing the same?