Thorough evaluation and expert peer review of research are at the core of academic and scientific integrity. When researchers attend a conference or cite a paper, they do so with confidence that these events and publications are operated in good faith and have undergone a trusted review process to ensure, as much as possible, that the content they distribute is sound. Scientists who present their work at these conferences similarly trust that doing so enhances, rather than detracts from, their professional reputations. Meanwhile, media outlets that report on conferences expect that not only do the proceedings offer fresh insights on new research, but also the research has been vetted for its methodology and significance.

These expectations and assumptions about the legitimacy of publications and events organized by well-intentioned, competent groups with genuine interest in advancing science were long safe. However, predatory journals began to appear in the early 2000s and have become more common over the past decade, signaling that there are unscrupulous organizations willing to push scientific integrity aside for the sake of profit. These journals offer researchers easy access to publishing, for a fee, while dismissing typical quality controls like rigorous peer review or checks for plagiarism.

More recently, there has been an increase in the occurrence of similarly predatory (or “fake”) conferences across numerous scientific disciplines, including in the Earth and space sciences. Unfortunately, it is no longer safe to assume that a conference is genuine without doing proper background research into its organizers and sponsors.

My colleagues and I have witnessed the growing trend of predatory conferences both firsthand and through discussions with clients. Our company provides technology and software solutions that help scientific conference organizers manage elements of their event planning, from participant registration to the peer review process. Admittedly, we have a vested interest in the success of legitimate conferences, with whom we do business, so the growth of predatory conferences has repercussions for us as a company. More important, however, is that these activities harm researchers who fall prey to them, and they threaten to damage public perceptions of and trust in science.

The Growing Problem of Fake Conferences

For most academics, attending scholarly conferences is a conventional part of advancing one’s research and growing one’s career. For early-career researchers especially, these events are an important way to build CVs, develop professional brands, share research, and gather valuable feedback. Conferences also present unique opportunities to network with like-minded people who may later become colleagues, research partners, employers, or funders. Researchers and others in academia, industry, government, and nonprofit organizations can mingle and share ideas during formal sessions and gatherings, in hallways and lobbies between sessions, over dinner, or, more recently, in online discussions hosted as part of remote or hybrid conferences.

In short, such meetings are organized to bring together scholars whose work overlaps and to create an environment for idea-sharing and research development. This is not the case when it comes to fake conferences, which unfortunately often look and sound superficially like standard academic conferences. Their websites boast of renowned speakers, and they advertise events hosted at reputable venues and backed by high-profile sponsors.

Although the term “fake” may suggest that these are not real events, they actually do take place. However, they are typically not nearly as well organized as advertised, nor does their content live up to the billing. Participants often find ill-attended events that lack the prestigious keynote speakers advertised and have few learning or networking opportunities.

Predatory academic conferences are more common than you may think. Even as of 2017, there were reportedly more such conferences available to scientific researchers than there were genuine events held by scholarly groups that follow standard peer review processes.

In a recent study conducted over a 2-year period by the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP), of more than 1,800 researchers working in 112 countries who were surveyed anonymously, 80% reported that predatory journals and conferences either were a serious problem in their country already or were becoming a serious problem. Of those surveyed, 11% acknowledged having published in a predatory journal, 2% knowingly and 9% who were completely unaware at the time. Meanwhile, 4% acknowledged having participated in a predatory conference, with 1% attending knowingly and 3% unaware. Another 6% of respondents were uncertain whether they had attended a predatory conference.

Predatory conferences are big business, organized with the primary goal of profit generation. In particular, they are set up to scam people out of registration and publishing fees, and as a result, organizers are known to accept every proposed submission regardless of merit, as long as it is accompanied by a registration fee. The conferences thus lack the scientific and editorial integrity required of a legitimate academic meeting.

These events are being organized mostly by a relatively small number of large, international organizations, although smaller companies have recently entered the industry. Senthil Gopinath, CEO of the International Congress and Convention Association, a trade group for the association meetings industry, has commented on the scale and impact of predatory conferences: “Tens of thousands of terrible quality and sometimes fraudulent conferences are today being promoted around the world, which presents an industrial-scale challenge to bona fide associations and their quality education programs. It’s a global phenomenon, which today impacts negatively on almost every scientific discipline.”

Wasted Resources, Bad Science, and Eroded Trust

Extrapolating from its recent survey results, the IAP estimated that at least 1 million researchers globally have fallen prey to predatory journals and conferences, and that these activities have wasted billions of dollars in research funding—for example, on time and materials spent on research published in predatory journals as well as on registration and travel expenses to attend predatory conferences. The IAP report also noted that significant reputational damage and emotional stress for scientists sometimes accompany the realization that they’ve been “duped or scammed.”

While researchers at all career levels are susceptible to falling prey to these predatory practices, early-career academics may be particularly at risk, lured by tempting opportunities to gain experience presenting their work and build their resumes and careers amid competitive “publish or perish” environments. These researchers, who are often struggling to find funding, waste their scarce and hard-earned money on expenses related to attending or presenting at a fake conference. Furthermore, the IAP report points out that “researchers in low- and middle-income countries were more likely to report they had used predatory practices, or not know if they had, than those in higher-income ones.” This trend could be explained by predatory conference organizers targeting countries where there are fewer opportunities for researchers, among other reasons.

The existence of predatory conferences and journals—and the unvetted science they present—risks damaging the legitimacy of academia and the scientific enterprise in the eyes of policymakers, community leaders, and those in the public who rely on scientific expertise but may not be equipped to distinguish what is or is not solid science. The more these people’s work, lives, and decisions are undermined by bad science, the less faith they are likely to have in credible research. And if they do not trust the work being published by academic sources, where will they turn for information?

The growth of predatory conferences and journals may also offer more opportunities for underqualified and underinformed commentators to pass off bad science as legitimate, whether on purpose or not. This is especially true in an era when misinformation is rampant, the trustworthiness of unbiased, reliable sources of scientific information is increasingly questioned, and anyone with a social media account can potentially build an audience of millions. In this environment, the sanctity of research-based, peer-reviewed scientific findings is vitally important.

Considering these costs to researchers and to research integrity, it’s clear the academic community must face predatory conferences head-on.

In a few isolated incidents, legal action has been taken against the organizers of predatory conferences. For example, in 2016, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed charges against several companies, alleging that they lied to researchers about their conferences and publications. And in 2019, a federal court found that the companies’ claims that research submissions underwent a rigorous peer review process and review by editorial boards made up of well-respected academics were false, ordering them to pay more than $50 million to resolve the charges.

Despite the occasional legal and financial penalties doled out to predatory conference organizers for their practices, not much can be done from an institutional perspective to protect the academic community. Perhaps the most effective means to tackle the problem is for individual researchers to recognize and avoid predatory conferences for themselves.

Recognizing and Avoiding Predatory Conferences

Predatory conferences can be difficult to differentiate from legitimate conferences. However, there are steps researchers can take and telltale signs to look for that will help determine whether an event is worth their time and money. The following approaches may be especially useful:

Research the organization putting on the event. Chances are you know of the major think tanks and organizations that would organize legitimate events in your field of expertise. If a conference organizer is a private company or an organization you don’t know about, or you’re considering an event outside your primary field, do some digging. Research the organization online and search for lists of predatory conferences that have been identified. Even if the event you’re considering is not listed, if the organization hosting it has been called out for organizing predatory conferences in the past, it’s reasonable to be suspicious. You can also check the website Think. Check. Attend., which aims to help researchers judge the legitimacy and academic credentials of conferences to help them determine whether they are legitimate and worthy of pursuit.

Spend some time on the event website. Legitimate academic conferences will build a website that’s an extension of their main site. If a conference’s website URL is completely unrelated to an academic or reputable professional organization, that’s a red flag.

Consider the sponsors. Some predatory conferences will list big-name sponsors to create the appearance of a well-funded, well-planned event. But are the sponsors mentioned relevant to the topic of the conference? If you’re considering attending a conference in the Earth and space sciences but the main sponsors appear to be medical or biotechnology companies, for example, it would be a good idea to investigate further, perhaps by contacting the supposed sponsoring organizations to verify their participation.

Connect with the event organizers. If you’re skeptical about the legitimacy of an event, reach out to the organizers. Ask about their peer review process and details related to the venue and agenda. Organizers of a legitimate conference will be communicative and happy to clarify any questions you have about their event. If their reply is suspicious, or they don’t reply at all, chances are you’re better off sitting out the event.

Academic and professional conferences offer important avenues to gain experience, learn about cutting-edge research, gather feedback about one’s own work, and network with peers and potential collaborators, employers, and funders. Predatory conferences must not deter us from participating in conferences as a whole, but it is increasingly vital to do our research before sending off that registration fee. Funding for scientific and technical innovation, researchers’ reputations, and public trust in the reliability of science are all at stake.

Author Information

Matthieu Chartier (matt@fourwaves.com), Fourwaves, Quebec City, Que., Canada

Citation: Chartier, M. (2022), The alarming rise of predatory conferences, Eos, 103, https://doi.org/10.1029/2022EO220449. Published on 15 September 2022.

This article does not represent the opinion of AGU, Eos, or any of its affiliates. It is solely the opinion of the author.

Text © 2022. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):

September 8, 2022 Chilean political activist Antonia Atria explains why that country’s voters rejected a proposed new constitution • Juliana Fredman, a public interest lawyer in the Bay Area, analyzes Biden’s student debt relief plan

The boys start with a roundtable discussion of 9/11 and modern fashion trends. Then, we take a look at the New York Times new in-depth reporting on Yeshiva schools in NYC failing to teach children basic skills, and how that relates to the state & purpose of public education in general. Finally, Will has sourced an exquisite reading series on the passing of the Queen by Chicago’s own Jon Kass.

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• Preface
• Comparation Table
• Emacs: what you type is not what you see
• Short summary

Preface

This article is a summary of two previous posts that you can read at these pages:

• “Vim: Study on constructing Regular Expressions to delete or reduce blank lines with Global Command”
• “Emacs: Study on constructing Regular Expressions to delete or reduce blank lines”

The topic of “regular expressions” in Vim and Emacs is well suited for a functional comparison across the four different scenarios covered in the above articles to which I refer for a description of the syntax.

Comparation Table

Emacs: what you type is not what you see

As explained in the article on Emacs, what you type is not what you see.

Below is a brief summary table for the operation of “reducing” blank lines, the third and fourth formulas in the above table, by distinguishing the keys pressed from the characters displayed.

Short summary

The subject of regular expressions in Vim and Emacs shows several differences between the two editors.

I am unable to determine which implementation is the best one.

It is necessary, in any case, to consider that Emacs has a very good emulator of Vim, called Evil, that allows one to use the same regular expression language as the source editor.

Thank you for your attention.

When I worked at Facebook, I worked on making cross-region failover for source control more effective and automated.

Before my work, when we were doing a cross-region failover, we brought the whole team in a room for the day. We also brought food and coffee and ran through the commands as a group to add extra-safety and make sure we didn't cause an incident. We ran together through a list of 20 different commands to run and expectations/check about what they would do. The whole process was slow and error-prone because of how complex the commands were and the number of context dependent substitution in those commands (like the name of the regions)

In one of the most defining moment of my career, one of my colleague ran a command in the wrong terminal window during a failover and it caused an incident. The incident review that followed was really tough for me and I was scared of participating in another failover. It was the nudge I needed to automate the processes. Here is how I proceeded:

• (1) Turn the runbook into a script printing text
• (2) Replace the steps with commands gradually
• (3) Add a lot of assertion
• (4) Add a dry-run mode
• (5) (Optional) Create a model of the system
• (6) Convincing others and going live

def step(txt):
    print(txt)
    print('Press enter when done')
    input()

step('Create an empty file for the report')
step('Check disk space on your computer')
step('Add the date to the report file')
step('Log in to the primary server')
step('Check the disk space')

from dataclasses import dataclass
import os
import subprocess

import fire

def step(txt):
    print(txt)
    print('Press enter when done')
    input()


@dataclass(frozen=True)
class CommandRunner:
    dry_run:bool=True
    def __call__(self, command):
        if self.dry_run:
            print(f"Would run {command}")
        else:
            print(f"Running: {command}")
            subprocess.check_output(command, shell=True)

class SourceControlFailover(object):
    def failover(self, dry_run=True):
        run = CommandRunner(dry_run)
        print('Create an empty file for the report')
        run('touch /tmp/report.csv')
        if not dry_run:
            assert os.path.exists("/tmp/report.csv")
        step('Check disk space on your computer')
        step('Add the date to the report file')
        step('Log in to the primary server')
        step('Check the disk space')


if __name__ == '__main__':
  fire.Fire(SourceControlFailover)

python script.py failover

python script.py failover --dry-run=False

What does the US Cold War with China and Russia mean for Africa? Can China’s rise benefit the continent, providing it leverage and another partner to rely on? Or is the State Department correct that China is engaging in neocolonialism and that African countries should be cautious and prioritize their relationship with the US? 

To discuss this and more, Rania Khalek was joined by Kambale Musavuli, an activist, writer, and analyst with the Center for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa. 

Kambale’s organization: https://cereck.org/ 

Listen to every episode of Rania Khalek Dispatches anywhere you get podcasts.

Apple: https://apple.co/3zeYpeW 

Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3za9DRK

As I’ve said before, I do almost all my writing in Org-mode so entering special characters is easy. I can either use the built-in Org characters or drop into TeX input mode. But, of course, I’m not always in Org-mode. Sometimes I want a special character when entering a Git description—most often → but occasionally others—and there are other situations where I need them as well.

My solution—that I learned from Xah Lee—is to use the abbrev system that’s built into Emacs. Thus, I have the abbreviation /ra for →. The other day, I saw this post by The Emacs Cat on using abbrev for inputting special characters anywhere within Emacs. It’s basically the same system that I use except that I depend on hippie expand to resolve my abbreviations rather than having them expand automatically, which I find jarring.

The Emacs Cat begins each of the abbreviation keys with 8 to avoid having accidental expansions. That’s a good solution and one that many may prefer. Regardless of which method you employ, using abbrev-mode to enter special characters that you need frequently is a win. You can always drop back to insert-char, bound to Ctrl+x 8 Return, to enter those that you don’t use often.

Take a look at The Emacs Cat’s post for the details on how to set things up.

Jeremy Friesen over at Takes on Rules has an interesting post on using Org-mode for his workflow. The exact situation is a bit more complex but it’s best thought of a way of time tracking.

Rather than use a packaged solution like Org-roam, Friesen rolls his own using the Org-capture template system. The basic idea is that he has projects and tasks in support of those projects. As he starts work on a project, he captures that project and further tasks are all accumulated under that project.

At the end of the month he runs org-clock-report to generate a time report for all the projects and tasks. It’s a nice workflow. One could, of course, prompt for the project for each task entry but whether that’s optimal or not depends on the individual workflow. Either way, it’s a good way of capturing the details of a workflow.

We pay our respects to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, then give our review of Breitbart’s new Hunter Biden biopic “My Son Hunter”.

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This week, Briahna has an intimate, soulful conversation with one of America's top public intellectuals, and a favorite guest of the pod: Dr. Cornel West. They discussed Biden's "MAGA Republican" speech and the utility of calling voters fascist, whether Biden also qualifies as one, how the left should handle the calls to abolish the FBI, the Mississippi water crisis and more. This is a top 10 all time Bad Faith ep.

Subscribe to Bad Faith on YouTube for video of this episode. Find Bad Faith on Twitter (@badfaithpod) and Instagram (@badfaithpod).

Produced by Armand Aviram.

Theme by Nick Thorburn (@nickfromislands).

Contained within: Joe Biden’s red light speech, Donald Trump’s Special Master, another new British PM, Pope fights the Catholic Deep State, French president sex gossip, Rick Scott blows election fund, Keffals vs. Kiwi Farms, and more!

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Quite often the ideas of ‘risk’ and of ‘uncertainty’ get bandied about interchangeably, but there’s a world of difference between them and it matters greatly when that distinction gets lost.

That’s a key message from psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, who has created an impressive case for both understanding the distinction and then acting appropriately based on the distinction.

“A situation with risk,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “is one where you basically know everything. More precisely, you know everything that can happen in the future … you know the consequences and you know the probabilities.” It is, as Bayesian decision theorist Jimmie Savage called it, “a small world.”

As an example, Gigerenzer takes us a spin on a roulette wheel – you may lose your money on a low-probability bet, but all the possible options were known in advance.

Uncertainty, on the other hand, means that all future possible events aren’t known, nor are their probabilities or their consequences. Rounding back to the roulette wheel, under risk all possibilities are constrained to the ball landing on a number between 1 and 36. “Under uncertainty, 37 can happen,” he jokes.

“Most situations in which we make decisions,” says Gigerenzer, “involve some sort of uncertainty.”

Dealing with risk versus dealing with uncertainty requires different approaches. With risk, all you need is calculation. With uncertainty, “calculation may help you to some degree, but there is no way to calculate the optimal situation.” Humans nonetheless have tools to address uncertainty. Four he identifies are heuristics, intuition, finding people to trust, and adopting narratives to sustain you.

In this podcast, he focuses on heuristics, those mental shortcuts and rules of thumb that often get a bad rap. “Social science,” he says, “should take uncertainty seriously, and heuristics seriously, and then we have a key to the real world.”

When asked, Gigerenzer lauds Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky for putting “the concept of heuristics back on the table.” But he disagrees with their fast-slow thinking model that gives quick, so-called System 1 thinking less primacy than more deliberative thinking.

“We have in the social sciences a kind of rhetoric that heuristics are always second best and maximizing would be always better. That’s wrong. It is only true in a world of risk; it is not correct in a world of uncertainty, where by definition you can’t find the best solution simply because you don’t know the future.”

Researchers, he concludes, should “take uncertainty seriously and ask the question, ‘In what situations do these heuristics that people use (and experts use) actually work?’ and not just say, ‘They must be wrong because they are a heuristic.’”

Gigerenzer is the director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam and partner at Simply Rational – The Institute for Decisions. Before that he directed the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and at the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research.

His books include general titles like Calculated Risks, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, and Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions, as well as academic books such as Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, Rationality for Mortals, Simply Rational, and Bounded Rationality.

Awards for his work include the American Association for the Advancement of Science Prize for Behavioral Science Research for the best article in the behavioral sciences in 1991, the Association of American Publishers Prize for the best book in the social and behavioral sciences for The probabilistic revolution, the German Psychology Award, and the Communicator Award of the German Research Foundation. He was a 2014 fellow at the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind University of California, Santa Barbara (SAGE Publishing is the parent of Social Science Space) and a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science in 2008.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save.

Join the debate and discuss this episode with fellow listeners on our Multytude conversation. Multytude is a new social media app that aims to make sense of the online conversation. With support from the SAGE Concept Grant, the Multytude team is working to create a new method of qualitative research for social scientists to better understand what people are saying about the big issues of today.

For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.

The post Gerd Gigerenzer on Decision Making appeared first on Social Science Space.

Panel: Kyle Anzalone, Joanne Leon, Elijah Magnier, Dan Wright. 

Discussion about the protests and political crisis in Iraq and the Iran deal JCPOA. 

Elijah Magnier is a veteran war correspondent and political analyst with over 35 years of experience covering the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Kyle Anzalone is the opinion editor of Antiwar.com, news editor of the Libertarian Institute, and co-host of Conflicts of Interest. Dan Wright is a writer and podcaster and the co-founder of Around the Empire.

FOLLOW Elijah on Twitter @ejmalrai. Find and support his work on his website https://ejmagnier.com where you can subscribe and donate.

FOLLOW Kyle on Twitter @KyleAnzalone_ and @Con_Interest, find his writing at Libertarian Institute and Antiwar.com and on Patreon.

FOLLOW Dan on Twitter @DSW_xyz

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Find everything on http://aroundtheempire.com  and linktr.ee/aroundtheempire

Recorded on August 31, 2022. Music by Fluorescent Grey.

Reference Links:

The Nuclear Deal is not Ripe Yet and Israel’s Worries are Irrelevant, Elijah Magnier

“It’s been said there are three kinds of people in the world, those who can count and those who can’t count.” So reads a sentence in the book Innumeracy in the Wild: Misunderstanding and Misusing Numbers, published by Oxford University Press in 2020.

The author of Innumeracy in the Wild is Ellen Peters, Philip H. Knight Chair and director of the Center for Science Communications Research at the University of Oregon. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Peters – who started as an engineer and then became a psychologist – explains to interviewer David Edmonds that despite the light tone of the quote, innumeracy is a serious issue both in scale and in effect.

As to scale, she notes that a survey from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found 29 percent of the US adult population (and 24 percent in the UK) can only do simple number-based processes, things like counting, sorting, simple arithmetic and simple percentages. “What it means,” she adds, “is that they probably can’t do things like select a health plan; they probably can’t figure out credit card debt,” much less understand the figures swirling around vaccination or climate change.

Peters groups numeracy into three (a real three this time) categories: Objective numeracy, the ability to navigate numbers that can be measured with a math test; subjective numeracy, which is “not your actual ability, but your confidence in your ability to understand numbers and to use numeric kinds of concepts;” and intuitive or evolutionary numeracy, a human being’s natural ability to do things like quickly determine if a quantity is bigger or smaller than another quantity.

That middle type of numeracy, the subjective, is measured by self-reporting. “The original reasons for developing some of these subjective numeracy scales had to do with them just being a proxy for objective numeracy,” says Peters. “But what’s really interesting is that having numeric confidence seems to free people to be able to use their numeric ability.” While freedom is generally reckoned to be good – and objective results back this up – that’s not the case for those confident about their abilities but actually bad with numbers. Similarly, those who have high ability but are underconfident also do poorly compared to high ability and high confidence individuals.

“There are some very deep psychological habits that people who are very good with numbers have that people who are not as good with numbers don’t have,” Peters explains. “It is the case that people who are highly numerate are better at calculations, but they also just simply have a better, more developed set of habits with numbers.”

Less numerate people “are kind of stuck” with the numeric information as presented to them, rather than transforming the information into something that might better guide their decisions. Peters offered the example of a person with a serious disease being told that a life-saving treatment still has a 10 percent chance of killing them. Highly numerate people recognize that that means it has a 90 percent survival rate, but the less numerate might just fixate on the 10 percent chance of dying.

Closing out the podcast, Peters offers some tips for addressing societal innumeracy. This matters because, she notes, research shows that despite high rates of innumeracy, providing numbers helps people make better decisions, with benefits for both their health and their wealth.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save.

Join the debate and discuss this episode with fellow listeners on our Multytude conversation. Multytude is a new social media app that aims to make sense of the online conversation. With support from the SAGE Concept Grant, the Multytude team is working to create a new method of qualitative research for social scientists to better understand what people are saying about the big issues of today.

For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.

The post Ellen Peters on Numeracy appeared first on Social Science Space.

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If you think you know everything you need to know about the Inflation Reduction Act, I hate to tell you: You're wrong. Few people know more about the procedural maneuvers that keep Americans docile than The Lever's David Sirota. On today's episode, he explains aspects of the parliamentarian maneuver that were new even to Brie, and unpacks the side agreement between Manchin & Schumer that secured Manchin's vote, but which might also spell climate doom.

Subscribe to Bad Faith on YouTube for video of this episode. Find Bad Faith on Twitter (@badfaithpod) and Instagram (@badfaithpod).

Produced by Armand Aviram.

Theme by Nick Thorburn (@nickfromislands).

Featuring Quinn Slobodian on his book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. The story of neoliberalism’s Geneva School—including Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Wilhelm Röpke—and their vision for a new global order to protect the market from democratic forces in the metropole and across the decolonizing world. An interview from archives first conducted in November 2018.

Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

Check out these Haymarket titles:

Keywords for Capitalism by John Patrick Leary haymarketbooks.org/books/1886-keywords-for-capitalism

Struggle Makes Us Human by Vijay Prashad haymarketbooks.org/books/1869-struggle-makes-us-human

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Rogers had a catastrophic failure in July 2022. It affected emergency services (as in: people couldn't call 911, but also some 911 services themselves failed), hospitals (which couldn't access prescriptions), banks and payment systems (as payment terminals stopped working), and regular users as well. The outage lasted almost a full day, and Rogers took days to give any technical explanation on the outage, and even when they did, details were sparse. So far the only detailed account is from outside actors like Cloudflare which seem to point at an internal BGP failure.

Its impact on the economy has yet to be measured, but it probably cost millions of dollars in wasted time and possibly lead to life-threatening situations. Apart from holding Rogers (criminally?) responsible for this, what should be done in the future to avoid such problems?

It's not the first time something like this has happened: it happened to Bell Canada as well. The Rogers outage is also strangely similar to the Facebook outage last year, but, to its credit, Facebook did post a fairly detailed explanation only a day later.

The internet is designed to be decentralised, and having large companies like Rogers hold so much power is a crucial mistake that should be reverted. The question is how. Some critics were quick to point out that we need more ISP diversity and competition, but I think that's missing the point. Others have suggested that the internet should be a public good or even straight out nationalized.

I believe the solution to the problem of large, private, centralised telcos and ISPs is to replace them with smaller, public, decentralised service providers. The only way to ensure that works is to make sure that public money ends up creating infrastructure controlled by the public, which means treating ISPs as a public utility. This has been implemented elsewhere: it works, it's cheaper, and provides better service.

A modest proposal

Global wireless services (like phone services) and home internet inevitably grow into monopolies. They are public utilities, just like water, power, railways, and roads. The question of how they should be managed is therefore inherently political, yet people don't seem to question the idea that only the market (i.e. "competition") can solve this problem. I disagree.

10 years ago (in french), I suggested we, in Québec, should nationalize large telcos and internet service providers. I no longer believe is a realistic approach: most of those companies have crap copper-based networks (at least for the last mile), yet are worth billions of dollars. It would be prohibitive, and a waste, to buy them out.

Back then, I called this idea "Réseau-Québec", a reference to the already nationalized power company, Hydro-Québec. (This idea, incidentally, made it into the plan of a political party.)

Now, I think we should instead build our own, public internet. Start setting up municipal internet services, fiber to the home in all cities, progressively. Then interconnect cities with fiber, and build peering agreements with other providers. This also includes a bid on wireless spectrum to start competing with phone providers as well.

And while that sounds really ambitious, I think it's possible to take this one step at a time.

Municipal broadband

In many parts of the world, municipal broadband is an elegant solution to the problem, with solutions ranging from Stockholm's city-owned fiber network (dark fiber, layer 1) to Utah's UTOPIA network (fiber to the premises, layer 2) and municipal wireless networks like Guifi.net which connects about 40,000 nodes in Catalonia.

A good first step would be for cities to start providing broadband services to its residents, directly. Cities normally own sewage and water systems that interconnect most residences and therefore have direct physical access everywhere. In Montréal, in particular, there is an ongoing project to replace a lot of old lead-based plumbing which would give an opportunity to lay down a wired fiber network across the city.

This is a wild guess, but I suspect this would be much less expensive than one would think. Some people agree with me and quote this as low as 1000$ per household. There is about 800,000 households in the city of Montréal, so we're talking about a 800 million dollars investment here, to connect every household in Montréal with fiber and incidentally a quarter of the province's population. And this is not an up-front cost: this can be built progressively, with expenses amortized over many years.

(We should not, however, connect Montréal first: it's used as an example here because it's a large number of households to connect.)

Such a network should be built with a redundant topology. I leave it as an open question whether we should adopt Stockholm's more minimalist approach or provide direct IP connectivity. I would tend to favor the latter, because then you can immediately start to offer the service to households and generate revenues to compensate for the capital expenditures.

Given the ridiculous profit margins telcos currently have — 8 billion $CAD net income for BCE (2019), 2 billion $CAD for Rogers (2020) — I also believe this would actually turn into a profitable revenue stream for the city, the same way Hydro-Québec is more and more considered as a revenue stream for the state. (I personally believe that's actually wrong and we should treat those resources as human rights and not money cows, but I digress. The point is: this is not a cost point, it's a revenue.)

The other major challenge here is that the city will need competent engineers to drive this project forward. But this is not different from the way other public utilities run: we have electrical engineers at Hydro, sewer and water engineers at the city, this is just another profession. If anything, the computing science sector might be more at fault than the city here in its failure to provide competent and accountable engineers to society...

Right now, most of the network in Canada is copper: we are hitting the limits of that technology with DSL, and while cable has some life left to it (DOCSIS 4.0 does 4Gbps), that is nowhere near the capacity of fiber. Take the town of Chattanooga, Tennessee: in 2010, the city-owned ISP EPB finished deploying a fiber network to the entire town and provided gigabit internet to everyone. Now, 12 years later, they are using this same network to provide the mind-boggling speed of 25 gigabit to the home. To give you an idea, Chattanooga is roughly the size and density of Sherbrooke.

Provincial public internet

As part of building a municipal network, the question of getting access to "the internet" will immediately come up. Naturally, this will first be solved by using already existing commercial providers to hook up residents to the rest of the global network.

But eventually, networks should inter-connect: Montréal should connect with Laval, and then ">">Trois-Rivières, then Québec City. This will require long haul fiber runs, but those links are not actually that expensive, and many of those already exist as a public resource at RISQ and CANARIE, which cross-connects universities and colleges across the province and the country. Those networks might not have the capacity to cover the needs of the entire province right now, but that is a router upgrade away, thanks to the amazing capacity of fiber.

There are two crucial mistakes to avoid at this point. First, the network needs to remain decentralised. Long haul links should be IP links with BGP sessions, and each city (or MRC) should have its own independent network, to avoid Rogers-class catastrophic failures.

Second, skill needs to remain in-house: RISQ has already made that mistake, to a certain extent, by selling its neutral datacenter. Tellingly, MetroOptic, probably the largest commercial dark fiber provider in the province, now operates the QIX, the second largest "public" internet exchange in Canada.

Still, we have a lot of infrastructure we can leverage here. If RISQ or CANARIE cannot be up to the task, Hydro-Québec has power lines running into every house in the province, with high voltage power lines running hundreds of kilometers far north. The logistics of long distance maintenance are already solved by that institution.

In fact, Hydro already has fiber all over the province, but it is a private network, separate from the internet for security reasons (and that should probably remain so). But this only shows they already have the expertise to lay down fiber: they would just need to lay down a parallel network to the existing one.

In that architecture, Hydro would be a "dark fiber" provider.

International public internet

None of the above solves the problem for the entire population of Québec, which is notoriously dispersed, with an area three times the size of France, but with only an eight of its population (8 million vs 67). More specifically, Canada was originally a french colony, a land violently stolen from native people who have lived here for thousands of years. Some of those people now live in reservations, sometimes far from urban centers (but definitely not always). So the idea of leveraging the Hydro-Québec infrastructure doesn't always work to solve this, because while Hydro will happily flood a traditional hunting territory for an electric dam, they don't bother running power lines to the village they forcibly moved, powering it instead with noisy and polluting diesel generators. So before giving me fiber to the home, we should give power (and potable water, for that matter), to those communities first.

So we need to discuss international connectivity. (How else could we consider those communities than peer nations anyways?c) Québec has virtually zero international links. Even in Montréal, which likes to style itself a major player in gaming, AI, and technology, most peering goes through either Toronto or New York.

That's a problem that we must fix, regardless of the other problems stated here. Looking at the submarine cable map, we see very few international links actually landing in Canada. There is the Greenland connect which connects Newfoundland to Iceland through Greenland. There's the EXA which lands in Ireland, the UK and the US, and Google has the Topaz link on the west coast. That's about it, and none of those land anywhere near any major urban center in Québec.

We should have a cable running from France up to Saint-Félicien. There should be a cable from Vancouver to China. Heck, there should be a fiber cable running all the way from the end of the great lakes through Québec, then up around the northern passage and back down to British Columbia. Those cables are expensive, and the idea might sound ludicrous, but Russia is actually planning such a project for 2026. The US has cables running all the way up (and around!) Alaska, neatly bypassing all of Canada in the process. We just look ridiculous on that map.

(Addendum: I somehow forgot to talk about Teleglobe here was founded as publicly owned company in 1950, growing international phone and (later) data links all over the world. It was privatized by the conservatives in 1984, along with rails and other "crown corporations". So that's one major risk to any effort to make public utilities work properly: some government might be elected and promptly sell it out to its friends for peanuts.)

Wireless networks

I know most people will have rolled their eyes so far back their heads have exploded. But I'm not done yet. I want wireless too. And by wireless, I don't mean a bunch of geeks setting up OpenWRT routers on rooftops. I tried that, and while it was fun and educational, it didn't scale.

A public networking utility wouldn't be complete without providing cellular phone service. This involves bidding for frequencies at the federal level, and deploying a rather large amount of infrastructure, but it could be a later phase, when the engineers and politicians have proven their worth.

At least part of the Rogers fiasco would have been averted if such a decentralized network backend existed. One might even want to argue that a separate institution should be setup to provide phone services, independently from the regular wired networking, if only for reliability.

Because remember here: the problem we're trying to solve is not just technical, it's about political boundaries, centralisation, and automation. If everything is ran by this one organisation again, we will have failed.

However, I must admit that phone services is where my ideas fall a little short. I can't help but think it's also an accessible goal — maybe starting with a virtual operator — but it seems slightly less so than the others, especially considering how closed the phone ecosystem is.

Counter points

In debating these ideas while writing this article, the following objections came up.

I don't want the state to control my internet

One legitimate concern I have about the idea of the state running the internet is the potential it would have to censor or control the content running over the wires.

But I don't think there is necessarily a direct relationship between resource ownership and control of content. Sure, China has strong censorship in place, partly implemented through state-controlled businesses. But Russia also has strong censorship in place, based on regulatory tools: they force private service providers to install back-doors in their networks to control content and surveil their users.

Besides, the USA have been doing warrantless wiretapping since at least 2003 (and yes, that's 10 years before the Snowden revelations) so a commercial internet is no assurance that we have a free internet. Quite the contrary in fact: if anything, the commercial internet goes hand in hand with the neo-colonial internet, just like businesses did in the "good old colonial days".

Large media companies are the primary censors of content here. In Canada, the media cartel requested the first site-blocking order in 2018. The plaintiffs (including Québecor, Rogers, and Bell Canada) are both content providers and internet service providers, an obvious conflict of interest.

Nevertheless, there are some strong arguments against having a centralised, state-owned monopoly on internet service providers. FDN makes a good point on this. But this is not what I am suggesting: at the provincial level, the network would be purely physical, and regional entities (which could include private companies) would peer over that physical network, ensuring decentralization. Delegating the management of that infrastructure to an independent non-profit or cooperative (but owned by the state) would also ensure some level of independence.

Isn't the government incompetent and corrupt?

Also known as "private enterprise is better skilled at handling this, the state can't do anything right"

I don't think this is a "fait accomplit". If anything, I have found publicly ran utilities to be spectacularly reliable here. I rarely have trouble with sewage, water, or power, and keep in mind I live in a city where we receive about 2 meters of snow a year, which tend to create lots of trouble with power lines. Unless there's a major weather event, power just runs here.

I think the same can happen with an internet service provider. But it would certainly need to have higher standards to what we're used to, because frankly Internet is kind of janky.

A single monopoly will be less reliable

I actually agree with that, but that is not what I am proposing anyways. Current commercial or non-profit entities will be free to offer their services on top of the public network.

And besides, the current "ha! diversity is great" approach is exactly what we have now, and it's not working. The pretense that we can have competition over a single network is what led the US into the ridiculous situation where they also pretend to have competition over the power utility market. This led to massive forest fires in California and major power outages in Texas. It doesn't work.

Wouldn't this create an isolated network?

One theory is that this new network would be so hostile to incumbent telcos and ISPs that they would simply refuse to network with the public utility. And while it is true that the telcos currently do also act as a kind of "tier one" provider in some places, I strongly feel this is also a problem that needs to be solved, regardless of ownership of networking infrastructure.

Right now, telcos often hold both ends of the stick: they are the gateway to users, the "last mile", but they also provide peering to the larger internet in some locations. In at least one datacenter in downtown Montréal, I've seen traffic go through Bell Canada that was not directly targeted at Bell customers. So in effect, they are in a position of charging twice for the same traffic, and that's not only ridiculous, it should just be plain illegal.

And besides, this is not a big problem: there are other providers out there. As bad as the market is in Québec, there is still some diversity in Tier one providers that could allow for some exits to the wider network (e.g. yes, Cogent is here too).

What about Google and Facebook?

Nationalization of other service providers like Google and Facebook is out of scope of this discussion.

That said, I am not sure the state should get into the business of organising the web or providing content services however, but I will point out it already does do some of that through its own websites. It should probably keep itself to this, and also consider providing normal services for people who don't or can't access the internet.

(And I would also be ready to argue that Google and Facebook already act as extensions of the state: certainly if Facebook didn't exist, the CIA or the NSA would like to create it at this point. And Google has lucrative business with the US department of defense.)

What does not work

So we've seen one thing that could work. Maybe it's too expensive. Maybe the political will isn't there. Maybe it will fail. We don't know yet.

But we know what does not work, and it's what we've been doing ever since the internet has gone commercial.

Legal pressure and regulation

In 1984 (of all years), the US Department of Justice finally broke up AT&T in half a dozen corporations, after a 10 year legal battle. Yet a decades later, we're back to only three large providers doing essentially what AT&T was doing back then, and those are regional monopolies: AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen (not counting T-Mobile that is from a different breed). So the legal approach really didn't work that well, especially considering the political landscape changed in the US, and the FTC seems perfectly happy to let those major mergers continue.

In Canada, we never even pretended we would solve this problem at all: Bell Canada (the literal "father" of AT&T) is in the same situation now. We have either a regional monopoly (e.g. Videotron for cable in Québec) or an oligopoly (Bell, Rogers, and Telus controlling more than 90% of the market). Telus does have one competitor in the west of Canada, Shaw, but Rogers has been trying to buy it out. The competition bureau seems to have blocked the merger for now, but it didn't stop other recent mergers like Bell's acquisition one of its main competitors in Québec, eBox.

Regulation doesn't seem capable of ensuring those profitable corporations provide us with decent pricing, which makes Canada one of the most expensive countries (research) for mobile data on the planet. The recent failure of the CRTC to properly protect smaller providers has even lead to price hikes. Meanwhile the oligopoly is actually agreeing on their own price hikes therefore becoming a real cartel, complete with price fixing and reductions in output.

There are actually regulations in Canada supposed to keep the worst of the Rogers outage from happening at all. According to CBC:

Under Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) rules in place since 2017, telecom networks are supposed to ensure that cellphones are able to contact 911 even if they do not have service.

I could personally confirm that my phone couldn't reach 911 services, because all calls would fail: the problem was that towers were still up, so your phone wouldn't fall back to alternative service providers (which could have resolved the issue). I can only speculate as to why Rogers didn't take cell phone towers out of the network to let phones work properly for 911 service, but it seems like a dangerous game to play.

Hilariously, the CRTC itself didn't have a reliable phone service due to the service outage:

Please note that our phone lines are affected by the Rogers network outage. Our website is still available: https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/contact/

https://mobile.twitter.com/CRTCeng/status/1545421218534359041

I wonder if they will file a complaint against Rogers themselves about this. I probably should.

It seems the federal government is thinking more of the same medicine will fix the problem and has told companies should "help" each other in an emergency. I doubt this will fix anything, and could actually make things worse if the competitors actually interoperate more, as it could cause multi-provider, cascading failures.

Subsidies

The absurd price we pay for data does not actually mean everyone gets high speed internet at home. Large swathes of the Québec countryside don't get broadband at all, and it can be difficult or expensive, even in large urban centers like Montréal, to get high speed internet.

That is despite having a series of subsidies that all avoided investing in our own infrastructure. We had the "fonds de l'autoroute de l'information", "information highway fund" (site dead since 2003, archive.org link) and "branchez les familles", "connecting families" (site dead since 2003, archive.org link) which subsidized the development of a copper network. In 2014, more of the same: the federal government poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a program called connecting Canadians to connect 280 000 households to "high speed internet". And now, the federal and provincial governments are proudly announcing that "everyone is now connected to high speed internet", after pouring more than 1.1 billion dollars to connect, guess what, another 380 000 homes, right in time for the provincial election.

Of course, technically, the deadline won't actually be met until 2023. Québec is a big area to cover, and you can guess what happens next: the telcos threw up their hand and said some areas just can't be connected. (Or they connect their CEO but not the poor folks across the lake.) The story then takes the predictable twist of giving more money out to billionaires, subsidizing now Musk's Starlink system to connect those remote areas.

To give a concrete example: a friend who lives about 1000km away from Montréal, 4km from a small, 2500 habitant village, has recently got symmetric 100 mbps fiber at home from Telus, thanks to those subsidies. But I can't get that service in Montréal at all, presumably because Telus and Bell colluded to split that market. Bell doesn't provide me with such a service either: they tell me they have "fiber to my neighborhood", and only offer me a 25/10 mbps ADSL service. (There is Vidéotron offering 400mbps, but that's copper cable, again a dead technology, and asymmetric.)

Conclusion

Remember Chattanooga? Back in 2010, they funded the development of a fiber network, and now they have deployed a network roughly a thousand times faster than what we have just funded with a billion dollars. In 2010, I was paying Bell Canada 60$/mth for 20mbps and a 125GB cap, and now, I'm still (indirectly) paying Bell for roughly the same speed (25mbps). Back then, Bell was throttling their competitors networks until 2009, when they were forced by the CRTC to stop throttling. Both Bell and Vidéotron still explicitly forbid you from running your own servers at home, Vidéotron charges prohibitive prices which make it near impossible for resellers to sell uncapped services. Those companies are not spurring innovation: they are blocking it.

We have spent all this money for the private sector to build us a private internet, over decades, without any assurance of quality, equity or reliability. And while in some locations, ISPs did deploy fiber to the home, they certainly didn't upgrade their entire network to follow suit, and even less allowed resellers to compete on that network.

In 10 years, when 100mbps will be laughable, I bet those service providers will again punt the ball in the public courtyard and tell us they don't have the money to upgrade everyone's equipment.

We got screwed. It's time to try something new.