CanCon Podcast Ep. 103: Are we breaking up with Facebook, or is Facebook breaking up with us?

According to its latest quarterly financial results, Facebook has 2.2 billion monthly active users. When one tech company can affect 1/4 of the world’s population with a single feature update or algorithm change, should it be able to without oversight? That’s a question we’re prompted to ask this week, as Mark Zuckerberg’s Guilt Cleanse 2018™ leads him to make sweeping changes to how the world experiences the modern ‘internet’. Here’s a bigger question we didn’t ask: do we need a bill of digital information rights?

While you let that question decant for a few moments, we’re already on to another about Canada’s big fourth telecom that isn’t, Freedom Mobile. News of parent company Shaw’s dramatic buyouts and “total business transformation initiative” has the CanCon podcast wondering if what we’re lamenting is A) the loss of a true Canadian tech competitor or B) just another seat at the oligopoly table.

Finally, CanCon steps into the wayback machine to take us all back to January 2017. Across the country, one unified message rang out from Canadian tech: diversity is our strength. One year later, what’s changed?

Join us as the CanCon crew – Erin Bury, Managing Director of Eighty-Eight; Jessica Galang, BetaKit News Editor; Rob Kenedi, TWG’s General Manager in New York; Patrick O’Rourke, MobileSyrup Senior Editor; and Douglas Soltys, BetaKit Editor-in-Chief – tries to answer some really tough questions.