Democratic Senator Al Franken spoke at the Netroots Nation Conference in Las Vegas on July 24th and urged the audience to look at the implications of the looming merger between Comcast and NBC.

If no one stops the Comcast and NBC merger, Franken asked: “How long do you think it will take before four or five mega corporations affectively control the flow of the information in America not only on television but online?”

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission issued the annual Communications Monitoring Report today, presenting growth figures for Canada's telecommunications and broadcasting industries in 2009.

General trends indicated a continuous increase in mobile and broadband internet usage, while conventional television and radio stations saw a decline in revenue last year.

An Ontario Superior Court judge approved the sale of CanWest Global Communication’s entire TV assets, including its specialty programming, to Shaw Communications Inc. for $2 billion. The deal includes the transfer of highly popular channels such as Global TV, Slice, Food Network Canada and HGTV.

The approval is a required and significant step in the complete transfer of Canwest’s TV channel operations to Shaw.

In accordance to their commitment to University of Ottawa’s open access program, The University of Ottawa Press has launched an open access collection that strives to enable free and unrestricted access to scholarly research.

Upon Netflix’s announcement to bring their online video rental services to Canada, Rogers lowered the bandwidth limit on two of their data plans shortly after.

Although Rogers urges that the changes are unrelated to Netflix’s expansion to Canada, it is hard to believe that Rogers isn’t attempting to prevent competition to their On Demand Online service that already allows Canadians to view TV shows and movies on their computers and mobile devices.