The Canadian technology community has a long history of working together with government and regulators to counter online harms such botnets, spam, and malicious hacking. It therefore came as a surprise when the CRTC launched a consultation on addressing botnets that raised the possibility of the regulator stepping in with new blocking mandates. The consultation just completed its first round of comments and in addition to industry experts, there were others that opportunistically looked at the blocking discussion as the chance to promote copyright related blocking or other Internet blocking requirements.
Jonathan Curtis has been at the heart of battling botnets and online harms for decades with work at Bell, the CRTC, and leading security companies. He joins the Law Bytes podcast in a personal capacity to place the online security challenges in historical context and to outline both the benefits and risks that come from the potential blocking approaches raised by the CRTC.
The podcast can be downloaded here, accessed on YouTube, and is embedded below. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcast, Google Play, Spotify or the RSS feed. Updates on the podcast on Twitter at @Lawbytespod.
Show Notes:
Credits:
Kaspersky, What is a Botnet?
Canadian digital law and policy in 2023 was marked by so many legislative battles that you needed a scorecard to keep track: Bill C-11...
The 2025 federal election is now in its second week and the battle for attention and ultimately votes is taking place both online and...
A lot has happened over the past six weeks since the last Law Bytes episode that provided a year-end review. TikTok briefly went offline...
