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I strongly encourage watching Bill Gurley's talk from the All-In Summit about whenever Government gets involved with regulations and technology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9cO3-MLHOM

I'm sure everyone here has heard the libertarian perspective on government regulation.
Meh I learned a thing or two.
No doubt this will prick up the ears of the luddite Australian government who will become extremely enthused about doing the same thing.

I just wish our governments would leave tech alone.

What makes the average politician automatically dumber than the average AI startup or social media company decision-maker?
Size of organization is correlated with tolerance of stupidity and level of competition is inversely correlated. Governments are the largest organizations and are monopolies. You get max level of stupidity as expected.
Being a politician has an inverse correlation to competency
Are you saying the least competent candidate is always the one who gets elected? Or just that only incompetent people become politicians?

Those are both pretty strong assertions so I assume you mean something else and I'm just not seeing it.

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> Are you saying the least competent candidate is always the one who gets elected? Or just that only incompetent people become politicians?

The candidate that is most capable of being elected is the one that either:

- Can garner the most votes

- Can prevent other candidates from getting votes

Nowhere in the above is technical competency a requirement to be elected. It may help, but its far down the list of "electable attributes".

Another way of putting it is that the hardest thing with being a (high level) politician is being elected.

I am active in my county and if you breath and can be nice for 1h we will give you a position somewhere.

> Are you saying the least competent candidate is always the one who gets elected?

The skills to get elected rely on being about to lie to people and lie to yourself as much as possible and be a narcissist at the same time, so all of these factors make it VERY unlikely that they correlate with actual competency.

Politicians are people-persons. They’re generally not technical people at all. It’s pretty rare for someone to be both a tech person and a people person. I have no idea why this is the case (other than stereotypes).
I'll grant that politics is a field that attracts "people persons", but the OP originally said (paraphrasing, since it's gone and I don't remember the exact language they used) that politicians were all dumb, with the implication that we should let tech startups decide everything re: AI instead.

What guarantees that the decision-makers at big companies like OpenAI are actually "smart techies" or even technical people at all? Doesn't being an executive or board member or high level decision maker actually attract people with the "soft skills" you need to reach those lofty heights?

I see this assumption a lot - "politicians are all stupid/incompetent" and it's weird to see it taken on faith by some people (I don't get the feeling you're one of them)

Incentives.

Politicians don't give a damn about being right, but rather to continue being elected.

Businesses don’t care about being right, but about making money.
And then the EU.

Because our current world is perfect and change is bad.

> The regulation plans are revealed in a letter from ISED Minister François-Philippe Champagne to the Industry committee studying Bill C-27, the privacy reform and AI regulation bill. The government is refusing to disclose the actual text of planned amendments to the bill.

So like between this and their online harms bill they are proposing not to mention their massive screw up with their other tech bills, is CA just trying to cut the Internet out of the lives of their citizens? Seriously what is going on there? Anyone in CA want to comment?

yup, a socialist coup
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

i appreciate your concern. the above is my sincere opinion, however I will refrain from posting political comments if that offends you.
>Anyone in CA want to comment?

Our media landscape is controlled by an oligopoly that has a stronghold on our federal politicians and web neutrality threatens that oligopoly.

Precisely.

Rogers, Telus, and Bell control practically all Canadian mobile/internet/tv/radio.

The bodies that are supposed to regulate them are run by former execs of these companies, and our competition bureau seems to think that anything short of one of them having 100% market share means they don’t need to actually intervene in any mergers or acquisitions.

Politicians obviously don’t want to upset three of the most powerful, well poised to influence public perception companies in Canada… which may as well be considered a single entity with respect to them actually competing at all. And so they basically all lobby for the same insane, protectionist, anti-competition, anti-consumer laws and regulations, and nearly always get their way.

In recent years this means prodding the government to introduce absurd regulations on the internet.

right right, the solution to an oligopoly is to have it controlled instead by a single entity that also has a monopoly on violence.
This is a lame duck government. They’ve been in power since 2015 and people are finally getting sick of them. The Liberal party (a minority government) is taking a ton of heat from the public right now due the housing crisis. Canada is #2 in the world for most unaffordable housing. We’re also the second largest country in the world (behind Russia) for land area yet it’s almost impossible to build housing in this country.

We also have extremely high grocery prices, to the point where a lot of people have started cross-border shopping for groceries in the U.S.

Anyway, those are the big issues Canadians worry about right now. These sorts of tech laws, as bad as they may be, aren’t even on the radar. People are just waiting for the next election so we can vote for some new people, who will in time cause other problems.

You realise this government has done one of the biggests things in modern history in regularting cannabis? Lame duck, nah, every single country in the world is feeling these same problems; we had conversatives in AUstralia the last 15yrs (just imagine you harper gov didnt get kicked out, whats what we lived with) and our economy is EXACTLY the same.

Taking away party from the debate, and we see the similiarties in our situations. The world is run by corperations who have been yeilding value from the supply chain over the last 40years, creating record profits, concentrating record power, printing record money. THIS IS THE RESULT THAT. No single government of today is to blame, its the system of picking sides that creates collatoral for polticans to barter with coperations for things like censorship, monopolistic access to markets via in/action of laws, etc etc.

OK, but why is America's economy so much healthier than Canada's?
Especially when it comes to housing.
Lame duck is a technical term in politics. It’s not meant as a disparaging term. It means an outgoing politician or government who is operating in a kind of “interregnum period.” It’s usually a time when politicians get involved with lower priority laws, special interests, and other such things they never touch when they’ve just won an election with a strong mandate.

Sure, you might argue that the Liberal party hasn’t been defeated in an election so they’re not technically a lame duck government yet. But my point is that they see the writing on the wall and they’re behaving like one. This is what I think explains the recent anti-tech laws. They’re doing their old media friends “a solid” before they leave office.

They legalized Cannabis and managed to botch it in spectacular ways that most people aren't aware of. It has been nothing but a gift to the black market selling mislabeled and contaminated products with virtually no risk of enforcement, while legal producers are all circling the financial drain and trying to stay solvent long enough for the USA or a major EU country to legalize. What could have been a major economic driver has seen tens of thousands of layoffs and site closures around the country, mainly in rural areas.

The federal government essentially took all of the most onerous and costly regulations from pharmaceuticals, agriculture, tobacco, and alcohol production and sales and applied them to cannabis. Meanwhile law enforcement efforts to curb black market cannabis production and sales basically ceased.

Several studies have shown that THC and CBD labeling are nearly always made up when it comes to black market retail and online unregulated dispensaries. Nearly all of the products also contain levels of bacteria, mold, toxins, pesticides, fungicides, and heavy metals that far exceed what legal producers are required to pay expensive analytical chemistry labs to test for before sales. Most of these things wont cause immediate symptoms, but (for example) Tomato fungicides aren't meant to be soaked into flowers then heated and inhaled and repeated exposure will almost certainly cause unattributed health issues down the line.

On top of all of this, the federal government and provinces decided to apply sales, excise taxes, and other fees right out the gate. Then provinces decided to only sell/distribute through crown corporations where the mandatory markup may as well be considered another tax.

All in all, when you buy a gram of cannabis in Canada for $6-10, 80-90% of that is tax. The cost of production, regulatory compliance, and a profit margin somehow need to come from the other 10-20%.

Meanwhile the black market can sell tainted mislabeled products for as low as it takes to eat legal market share, with no overhead or taxes to worry about. With free delivery!

Legalization has been a success in the sense that nobody is getting in trouble for possession anymore. Nearly everything else has been a disaster behind the scenes.

Disclaimer: Yes, LPs overbuilt and overestimated demand. There was mismanagement by pubcos. I was there.

> Meanwhile the black market can sell tainted mislabeled products for as low as it takes to eat legal market share, with no overhead or taxes to worry about. With free delivery!

This only serves to further convince myself (and likely others) to pay the high prices. I don't need to get high, and I'm much more likely to pay for safety - just like in nearly every other product on the market that is marked up due to safety regulations. So given the choice, I'll cut back before I go with the unregulated.

I don't think I'm alone in this either, considering Canadians seem to have an international reputation (at least among some Americans) for being, among other things, risk-averse.

Canadians are inherently stupid just like Americans. We vote like idiots. No party has ever done anything positive. It's all talk a good game and send money to your friends and increase taxes. Unfortunately people just don't want to wake up.

The news restrictions are because that's how the rest of the world will think Canada is great so we can import their slaves (citizens).

Legalized marijuana gets people excited, that's how sad it is.

What would you change to make it less likely that individual behaviour would impact society in a negative way?

It's easy to point the finger at a cohort and label them, stupid in this case. It is constructive to identify a trend and suggest something to improve the current state.

We are at a point of craziness where people are accusing each other of being Nazis. The only constructive thing that can happen is to remove the public education system at this point because it generates mindless robots.
> We’re also the second largest country in the world (behind Russia) for land area yet it’s almost impossible to build housing in this country.

Maybe a pedantic point, but it's HN after all:

Canada has always been sparsely populated but for a narrow band along the Canada/US border. This is due to a number of factors, not least of which is the climate of most of that area.

Now, certainly the unaffordability crisis is arguably largly due to policy choices of this and previous gov'ts, but Canada's land mass is not really a huge part of this equation.

Maybe a sarcastic point, HN be damned:

I heard Canadian government is also working on climate change, so they are apparently trying to make more land amenable to housing. (Although it's not clear whether the land gain won't be countered by sea level rise.)

I think you know that this 'narrow band' is far larger than most people can conceive of.
All I'm saying is that Canada being the second largest land mass is not super relevant to the discussion of housing affordability.
Available space is a necessary but not sufficient condition for affordable housing. If I were living in Hong Kong then I’d cut the government some slack for housing being unaffordable.

Here in Canada though? It’s absurd how much space we have and yet we can’t get anything done. This emphasizes the degree of government dysfunction, which was my original point.

It is if you're not being pedantic and you can acknowledge that the fraction of that land mass that is habitable is still huge and connected to infrastructure that would facilitate further expansion.
I have no idea why this government suddenly decided that regulating the internet was a top priority amid so many other pressing issues. While the legacy media lobby is an important factor, I can only imagine that it is not entirely disconnected from the information-control challenges encountered during the COVID pandemic.
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Hey hey they are doing way more than that. They are also trying to change the national anthem… again!
Why? What's wrong about using AI to moderate your platform? Are you supposed to underpaid workers from Colombia to do it and make them see horrible content?
UPD: It seems that the bill itself is not about the AI, but there are some undisclosed amendments to the bill that aren't yet public and that are said to target AI specifically. My bad. On the bright side - my wish to see a legal definition of an "AI" may still be granted :-)

--- Original comment below ---

Whem. Either I'm misunderstanding something (I've only quickly skimmed through the bill, can't say I understood any much), or the title is clickbait-ish, and this is:

1) Not about any AI at all (and here I was hoping to see a legal definition of an "AI", haha). The definition of "automated decision system" seem to cover just about anything from some fancy ML stuff to your basic fortune(6) program. Basically, if a machine rather than a human (or something else that is not a machine) had picked something, then it's an "automated decision system". At the very least, I have not found any sophistication requirements (but I could've missed it).

2) Only seem to apply when it's about use of personally identifying information. If I got it right, then if you track someone and a machine makes a "decision about the individual that could have a significant impact on them", then it applies. Otherwise, not so much. Again, I could be wrong, missing something or not really understanding what I've just read.

I haven't really understood how this applies to moderation. I suspect it's about when moderation system is building an user profile and feeding it to an automatic decision system, but that'd be weird (because every single mailhost with an anti-spam system would be affected).

Search engines, on the other hand? If I got it right, only those that do "personalized results" are affected.

So, some LLM processing search hits for a query and making a decision on what's good result and what's a spam is seemingly not covered. Tracking cookies seem to be the core component of this thing, not AI.

The "refused to discuss draft state" thing is remarkably common. I am unsure why so many governments do this. I suspect it's because a large number of bad ideas get dropped before public draft, and nobody wants to wear the newspaper headlines which say "Government considering mandating second head for all voting citizens" when the 2 head idea is only going to get dropped before the document goes live.

There's also the problem of multi-draft convergence. They don't want to "out" a proposal being thought out in concert with another agency, or economy. In effect the document has to remain sealed until the most important one decides it's time to declare. So, across the life of the drafting there are huge reserved chunks. This happened in the TPP docs, which had sealed sections. They enraged local IT people in Australia because of the strong likelihood of the US trying to wedge the Australian 'right to repair' laws and their effect on DRM/IPR locks.

I have very briefly seen 'behind the curtain' of this kind of thing (a ministerial communique for a meeting) and people take the secrecy seriously, because you won't be invited back to draw up the next one, if you blab about this one. It doesn't have to reflect anything particularly special. I think it's likely the mystique is maintained for it's own sake: Vanity.

That's a response to the problem of things scaling to global levels faster than they can react to it.
Yes. If you see a lot of "move fast and break things" happening in a space which you may need to regulate, you throw everything into the bag, shake it around and see what sticks when you turn it out again. Every idea under the sun including internet licences, eyeball scanning, and second heads will be in the bag at some point. The Second head speaks french. Don't ask me which one they will keep...
They need to be taking stakes in the companies when things (exploitation/loss of control etc) start escalating ala British East India Company taken over by the Queen after shit hits the fan. Or atleast the threat should be hanging over everyones head. There is no other way to slow the self important tech buffoon class down. Their 3 inch chimp brains aren't growing at the same speed as the tech and consequences of tech are. We already see some of early stages of this, with internet shutdowns every time they lose control of Jurassic Park. Regulations and the law are a total waste of time.
I for one am happy for only Zaphod Beeblebrox be allowed to vote.
Canadian here. Government sticking its nose into AI bias in human rights issues like law enforcement powers and employment standards … OK. But regulating search algorithms … feels worlds apart in importance and maybe too far.
I feel exactly the same way. There’s a huge amount of common sense that’s being missed, and I can’t understand why our government is trying to get there before anyone else.
While I'd generally agree and do not expect the government to do this correctly (no government succeeds with tech it seems), I do think there's a discussion to be had about just how search algorithms intersect with human rights issues.

The results you're fed are based on a profile of you, and how those results differ for people of different race, creed, economic background, etc. absolutely can become a human rights issue.

An extreme example of this might be: An indigenous user performs a search for how to get healthcare and the "AI" / "Algorithm" (whatever term you want) buries resources on much later pages of search results that are otherwise shown for caucasians. Replace "how to get healthcare" with "apply for a scholarship" or other similar concepts.

In practice I suspect nothing that awful is happening today but we do see all kinds of systems like this being only as good as the training data.

That sound you hear is billions of dollars being flushed down the toilet as tech companies pay expert witnesses (and lots of attorneys) to convince judges and juries that they're using "algorithms" instead of "artificial intelligence". (Keep telling the shareholders it's AI, though.)

This kind of reminds me of the whole DeCSS thing. Everyone ripped their DVDs. Several years too late, it was declared "illegal". Someone golfed it down to a t-shirt. People continued removing the digital restrictions from their media. Physical media is now dead as an industry, and literally nobody minds. Everyone is happier and the content creators make more money than ever before. AI feels like it's going down the same route. I have already seen the "generative AI in 40 lines of C", and those can easily be t-shirts. Whatever efforts are made to make AI illegal at this point are too little too late. The cat is out of the bag. Whatever you think is going to happen because of AI will probably happen. So it's probably time to find some cash to solve those problems, instead of paying expert witnesses to define what "is is".

No government in human history has ever succeeded in making math illegal. Canada is unlikely to be the first. (It is even more futile than making alcohol illegal, which still makes me laugh when I think about it. You leave sugar water out in air and it turns into alcohol. You can't solve that "problem" by signing a piece of paper that says a government says so. You are going to need more fungicide than humanity has the capability to produce. It is an unwinnable war. Fighting against AI is going to be like that.)

I think the hype about the downfall of humanity is probably overrated (a bold claim, because if I'm wrong you won't be around to make fun of me). The biggest impact will probably be things like banks denying loans to people for the wrong reasons. If that's what we're worried, make some laws that makes that illegal. It shouldn't matter what tools you use to get a result; whether you use AI or a bunch of employees sitting in a room with a pencil and paper to run an illegal business, the outcome is the same, the business has illegal practices and the government should step in.

> Failure to abide by the regulations can result in penalties as high as 3% of gross global revenues

Assuming all of Canada has internet access, Canada makes up less than 1% of people with internet. I wonder if companies will respond by simply blocking Canadians, as it would be cheaper, and encourage them to repeal this. Not that I want that at all, but it seems like a possibility.

That's exactly what the companies will do. They're already blocking news in Canada.
Are they? At least Google doesn't seem to be.
Google has said they will block news once the law is in effect.
Is that a bluff or not? Would Canada actually prefer it one way or the other?

What is the cost of making a Canadian team to tune results to Canada's laws? Is that less than possible earnings? Are all people equally valuable to Google or are people in wealthy nations worth proportionally more.

What if other countries follow suit?

news is already blocked on Meta owned companies.
I guess that Google news brings in a lot less revenue than Google search. So might it be possible that the trade-offs are different?
Google is planning to remove news from search in Canada as well.
I'm sure most Canadians will discover that VPNs are their solution to circumvent any "blockade".
Great, Canadians get to pay some shady VPN company $10-$20/month just to be able to use services the rest of the western world can for free.
Why do you think all the free VPNs are popping up?
I think it's because they're making money by selling access to your residential IP to people overseas to circumvent geo-blocking. And that's if you're lucky -- probably the expectation should be they're installing malware.
What?

I am talking about things from big providers like cloud flare, and some for pay options like private relay.

The rest of the world doesn't have the current Canadian government.
They'll just be like Europeans then. I have to use a VPN to read certain news sites.
Canada is a relatively rich country. So I would guess the average Canadian is worth more revenue than the average internet user?
Canada is turning out to be a banana republic.
I don't think that's even remotely true.
There is a housing bubble that none on the top likes to care about

Inflation is through the roof

Suppression of the free press (podcast) are planned and to be set in motion

The leader is doing vacation with Canadian's taxes

There is a carbon taxes that affect the middle-class and poor family

Housing prices are sky rocketing

Buy healthy grocery has gotten really expensive

CERB was a joke and facade on the first place

Corporations are given lee-way with what they can do

-------------------

Please explain as to why it is not remotely true!!!

>Banana republic, derogatory term for a country that has an economy dependent solely on revenue from exporting a single product or commodity. As a result, such countries are typically controlled by foreign-owned companies or industries. Banana republics usually have a highly stratified socioeconomic structure, with a small ruling class that controls access to wealth and resources, and are politically unstable. The term has its origins in the development of banana plantations by American corporations and their exploitation of land and workers in Central and South America beginning in the late 19th century.

- Dictionary Brittanica.

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I'm sorry guys, Eastern Canada has lost it's mind (and has been this way for some time) and keeps electing idiots....
This is why there is a secession movement in Alberta with meaningful support, and significant support for it in Saskatchewan and BC. As Peter Zeihan points out, secession in Canada is legal.

Those who claim that "US Democrats would be Conservatives in Canada" are completely wrong. Were Canada a part of the US in 2016, Trump would have won a majority of the vote in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and would have done very well in BC outside downtown Vancouver/Vancouver Island, Manitoba, and parts of the Greater Toronto Area and southern Ontario (probably not rural Ontario). In other words, the chunks of Canada that are the most similar to the chunks of the US that voted for Trump. The GTA parts I'm talking about are the ones that loved Rob Ford as mayor, and swung heavily for Doug Ford in 2018.

I don't really buy the meaningful support thing yet. I would say a small minority of vocal people that have zero chance of winning a secession referendum at this time. If the east keeps taking 20+ billion a year in taxes for ~5 billion in services provided while simultaneously blocking resource development and doing other obviously unjust things like including resource revenue in Alberta's transfer payment calculation and not including resource revenue from hydro in Quebec's then maybe in 20-30 years they will have a slim chance.

I think they know this too because they are pushing for disaggregation of services from Ottawa right now and actually have a chance of that because the cost of doing that is minimal and it will make their ultimate goal of leaving much easier if we have provincial pensions, police force, tax collection, etc. already in place.

>I think they know this too because they are pushing for disaggregation of services from Ottawa right now and actually have a chance of that because the cost of doing that is minimal and it will make their ultimate goal of leaving much easier if we have provincial pensions, police force, tax collection, etc. already in place.

Oh, sure, the meltdown on Reddit over the plans to establish Alberta's own pension is an indication of just how worried the opponents are. Since they can't deny Quebec's precedent here, they're freaking out over how it would destroy the CPP, while simultaneously avoiding the obvious implication that claiming such would reinforce Alberta's complaints about being drained to support the rest of the country. I haven't seen similar meltdowns about reestablishing APP but I probably just haven't looked hard enough.

My larger point is that, as I said, secession is legal in Canada. People are ignorant of/in denial over the full ramifications of Re Secession. <https://np.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/tkg5gf/who_has_...>

I wasn't disagreeing with the larger point, I was nitpicking the details;)
Is this going to result in less use of "AI" or less use of "AI" as a marketing term for "glorified statistical model"?

I'm not particularly convinced by claims of "intelligence" but that's not the point: the article uses "artificial intelligence system" sounding like that's the text, but what happens if you just say "this is a multidimensional statistical model", there is no intelligence, it is simply an automatically generated model?

To be clear, Canada is regulating speech online, not just AI and search. Also by Michael Geist not long ago: https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2023/10/crtcregistrationruling/

Basically a service like Rumble, which is publicly traded and has HQ in Toronto must register with the Canadian government to be allowed to continue existing.

All political podcasts have been ordered to register with the government.

Lets not forget: https://www.international.gc.ca/global-affairs-affaires-mond...

To be a new journalist, you have to be accredited by the government. Naturally the government doesn't accredit their critics and bans them from going to things like the debates.