The CRTC announced today that it will conduct an investigation into the costs of building a national database that would provide Emergency 911 operators with the physical street address of a broadband (VoIP) caller based on their internet address.
Called a location determination platform (LDP) by the CRTC, the registry would require access service providers, the companies that provide internet service, to maintain a database of customers that would include their civic address and internet (IP) address. The CRTC says the database would be used by 911 operators to determine the physical location of a 911 caller without the caller having to provide an address. The investigation by the CRTC appears to stem from the tragic and completely preventable death of a Calgary child in May of 2008.
In that incident, emergency services could not respond to a 911 call because the child’s family had neglected to inform their broadband telephone (VoIP) provider they had moved from Mississauga to Calgary.
Since there are over 12 million households, 230 access service providers and tens of millions of IP addresses in Canada, the cost of building an LDP, collecting the information, maintaining the information, electronically securing and transmitting the data is likely to be very high. When asked in 2006 what such a registry might cost to build, access service providers estimated the cost at $250 million dollars and would likely only cover 90% of all Canadian households.
In addition to the high cost of creating a National IP registry, which would not cover 10% of all Canadian households, the idea of a National IP registry is likely to raise valid concerns among Canadian privacy experts and civil liberty advocates.
In addition to being used by Emergency 911 services, a national IP registry that ties civic addresses to internet IP addresses could also be used by the police and government agencies to investigate any other activity it deems suspicious such as movie downloading or posting comments to the internet.
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