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Competition Bureau Canada report on Data Portability

Friday, January 23, 2026

Last week the Canadian Competition Bureau released the report Your Data, Your Control: How data portability can unlock competition and empower consumers. The surprisingly readable report centers around an experiment exploring data portability in the insurance sector, calculating that “introducing data portability could save Canadians “between $1.10 billion and $3.83 billion in both time and money on their annual costs.” I decided to read the report to understand how the Canadian federal government thinks about data portability in general, with an eye towards other digital spaces like social media, cloud, AI, and the types of stuff I am interested in.

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Best of 2025

Wednesday, December 31, 2025

Notable reads, watches, and questions for the year

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Surburban Development Cycle — a case from Japan

Sunday, December 28, 2025

For a couple of years we kept a very small apartment in Kyoto for monthly visits while we were taking care of my parents-in-law. The rent was cheaper than getting a hotel each time, and my parents stored stuff there which justified the expense. The apartment was on the very edge of southwest Kyoto in a neighbourhood called Rakusai Newtown, a housing project started in the 1970s for the families of men working in the factories of West Kyoto.

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Judging AI on its ability to expand capacity

Saturday, December 27, 2025

From Evgeny Morozov’s essay Socialism After AI: The driving imperative would not be “growth” measured as ever more commodities, but the enlargement of what people are actually able to do and be, individually and collectively. On that view, AI would be judged by whether it opens new spaces of competence, understanding, and cooperation, and for whom. A tool that lets teachers and students work in their own dialects, interrogate history from their vantage points, and share and refine local knowledge would score highly.

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