This is honestly quite exciting! In a good way too.

Now make Canada an EU member and I see the worlds' future brighten up quite a bit.

I mean this is something that all countries should have always been doing. It's convenient to piggyback on the private infrastructure of other nations, but I think that can only be viable in the long term if all nations have some of their own infra to balance power.

So Santa will finally have high-speed Internet?

This is amazing news. Too bad the entire Canadian government runs on Microsoft instead of FOSS.

Where will the cable go through? Greenland, then 52nd state?

/jk

If that also means not making deals with Palantir and the like then we're cooking with gas.

uh, Telesat Canada? They launch next month.

Now we wait to see the amount pledged and how fast they can act

Hopefully we can also get sovereign internet services to our entire population. Where I live in NB, 20 minutes outside the capital city, the options are: overloaded and poor reception to Xplore fixed wireless (which was sold to a US company is 2022), strangled and under-invested DSL circa 1995 from Bell, or Starlink.

Holy fuck I love this

As an American, please do this, my government should not be in charge of the global internet

Canada stepping up to fill the void the tea USA leaves would be so cool

In terms of cross-country/continental communication, this provides a bit more context on the current dependencies Canada faces. This is a great move in the right direction.

https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

Goddamn he's on fire.

The madder Trump gets at Canada, the more sure we can be that we're moving in the right direction.

Then there's Little PP with the jelly spine who thinks we should play nice. I don't know how the fuck anyone supports him at this point. Basically "lay back and think of England". Pathetic.

Skeptical ye ol Carney will achieve this in his current term, it’s a lot of work to do, and even if he does I suspect this will just be another tool to track Canadians.

Cool, now fix internet and cell prices to match europe and asia. I do not give a shit where my encrypted traffic gets routed if it costs 5x as much as the rest of the world.

Awesome! Don’t a few undersea cables already route through Canada? That should make it easier!

So, I seem to recall that early in the trade dispute, the Ford government in Ontario ripped up a Starlink deal they'd been working on, making a big show about not giving them more leverage. The next week, Rogers inked a deal with Starlink to provide satellite peering/connections to their customers, and then the Ontario government could get that service through a "Canadian" telco.

Point being, I don't believe a word our government says when it comes to their intentions with regards to detangling from US tech oligarchs, especially when they're leaning on companies like Bell, Rogers and Telus, which are massively dependent on US tech oligarchs. They'll "build up" a "sovereign" internet setup, by outsourcing the work to either American companies directly, or to Canadian companies acting as proxies for American companies to spare some optics. Sorta like how "Telus" doen't actually have Canadian sovereign email, they just resell google or microsoft. Hell, Telus's VoIP product, "Business Connect", is just a rebrand of Ring Central. They literally point users to the Ring Central manuals, because our big rich hugely profitable mighty telco, can't even write/maintain their own branded documentation. Even routes through RC servers down south for most calls.

It's also likely worth highlighting that some of those big telcos, like Telus, have like $19.5 billion in long term debt, with a market cap of like $20 billion. There's talk of big overhauls being required for Telus, as it's become too outsourced/unfocused, and its debt's out of control. But hey, Carney just announced a government bailout! Yay, liberal hand outs to big business! Canada foots the bill for the infrastructure, the Telcos get the profits, and it sounds like they'll get to completely write off taxes for a while too.

As for people in this thread mentioning things like "Good the US shouldn't control the internet", I don't think they really grasp the state that Canada's internet is in. There are practically no east west data cables / redundancy around, we just use the US's backbone most of the time. Almost all of our software reaches south for updates / patches etc, as the US doesn't put any of those things into Canada, even on proxy boxes -- but also, it's way faster for a server in Vancouver to grab updates from Seattle, than it is to route data to the east coast. This is partly due to our country having crazy bad population distributions, with metropolitan areas like Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal each having more people than entire provinces such as Manitoba and Sask -- it's nearly impossible to justify huge infrastructure spends in communities of like 500-1000 people. At best, this is likely to fill that infrastructure gap a bit -- but it won't change our dependency on US tech in a more practical way.

It's been like 2 years+ of this shit, and we still can't get something like a fairphone through the regular telcos -- like 99% of cell phones in Canada are Google or Apple, totally entrenched in those ecosystems. That's how much the telcos care about Data Sovereignty/Canada.

Now this is finally getting to core problems with American dominance in tech.

Big if true. Some pretty important details still need to be decided.

also Canada needs nukes.

ITS LITERALLY THE ONLY THING AMERICA UNDERSTANDS.

As the PM of a member nation of the Five Eyes, I'm pretty sure he's keenly aware of the mass surveillance done on the Internet traffic of everybody (even of that from nations referred to as "allies") routed through nodes controlled by Five Eyes member nations and the uses of that info for industrial espionage and political interference.

When setting up his sovereign internet network might want to bypass the UK too, by the way, given that as the Snowden Revelations showed they were some of the worst at this and already back then used their control of the end-points of most Atlantic underwater cables connecting Europe to North America, to do massive amounts of surveillance on Internet traffic between Europe to North America and then gave tons of that info to the US.

Including Britain in this network would just be a two-step way of giving the info to the US rather than direct.

Given that we don't know exactly what they're building, how it will be financed, or who will own it, I guess we're all free to imagine that it will involve something other than just giving lots of money to the Canadian telecom cartel.

And three years ago, after the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission said it would require some large telecom companies to share access to their fibre networks with competitors ...

Three years! How much progress have they made since then in restoring competition to the market for home Internet service? Any at all? At a glance it looks like the rate for TPIA is still prohibitively high, leading to retail prices from Teksavvy — the only independent ISP I know of which still exists — which are roughly double what I'm currently paying through Bell's flanker brand. It's looking like the promised repair of the once-great system will never happen. Not under a Liberal government, anyway. It will continue to be left to rot. Go on Carney, prove me wrong.

Edit to add: Here is Teksavvy once again pointing out that the wholesale rates set by the CRTC, like the ones Bell was complaining about 3 years ago, are still higher than the retail prices charged by the dominant providers.

Good opportunity to provide fast internet to those poor folks way up north.

Excellent. gO Canada!

I'm all in favour of this, this is a way better boondoggle than Sovereign AI.

Lethamyr's UK ping is about to get better.

👀 four eyes minus American five eyes 👀

Good deal.

I'm pessimistic. I don't think this will happen.

I love this guy!

This is seriously awesome, bravo!

is there a backdoor in https? I get resilience to preventing US from blocking Canadian packets, but back to first question.