MediaPolicy.ca

Catching up on MediaPolicy – YouTube’s fake AI Journalists – Go west, CBC – DM@X 2026

AI image by Perplexity

January 19, 2026

You like to think you’ll never fall for a digital fishing scam. You like to think you’ll never fall for a deep fake news video.

Ahem, I fell for a deep fake news video.

YouTube, in its algorithmic omniscience, pushed to me as its top daily recommendation a video of the famous Washington Post political corro George Will. As the NeverTrump Reaganite we know him to be, Will delivered a withering critique of US tariffs by pointing to Toyota’s investment of $40 billion in Canada. Later, after I searched for a news announcement and found none, I wised up. (My friend in the auto industry kindly reminded me that $40 billion equals eight new car plants).

But for a good ten minutes, I was all in. The AI-video had George Will on the screen, live and in the flesh, saying exactly what George Will would say and how he would say it, but strangely looking twenty years younger than his 85 years. Then checking the meta-data, the video creators claimed to be a George Will fan site. I very much doubt they were licensed to impersonate George. A week later, YouTube had taken it down.

A few days later YouTube pushed me a similar fake, this time tech journalist Kara Swisher. Fool me once, etc.

Digital deception is now a daily event, according to a Canadian poll. Fifty-two per cent of us are “very concerned” about it; a full 88% are concerned.

Canadians generally want action against digital deception and hold a mix of views on who ought to do the acting:

Meanwhile, news publishers are soaking their heads in an icy bucket of water.

The Oxford Reuters Institute posted a new year’s survey of 280 CEOs, executives and editors in 51 countries expressing, guess what, their deepening pessimism about the future prospects for journalism.

The collective wisdom was that news journalism is getting squeezed for audience attention (and ultimately revenue) on either side by AI and social media influencers. Thanks to AI-generated videos and Chat summaries, the latter published with or without links to digital news sites, publishers are expecting referral traffic to keep declining and more or less crash and burn.

If there’s a silver lining, twenty per cent of publishers believe they will make deals for significant licensing revenues, another 49% see a minor stream of revenue, and another 20% expect none. The latter group are concentrated in local media, public broadcasting and smaller countries.

A cause for optimism is that a lot of publishers are innovating by hiring digital creators to work with their journalists to compete in the influencer /video/ social media world.

Watch that space: I am waiting for someone to come up with a licensed AI-generated celebrity journalist/influencer who gets content up on the ‘net tout de suite in the news cycle. Someone like George Will.

***

As I’ve been griping about for some time now, the CBC has been slow out of the blocks to put its five year plan into action and earn that $150M raise in the Parliamentary grant.

We may be getting somewhere.

Editor in chief Brodie Fenlon just announced that CBC “will add 33 local journalists and create 11 new bureaus, increasing [our] Canadian footprint from 66 to 77 locations. This “boots-on-the-ground” investment is in addition to last year’s local service expansion of 30 journalists hired in 22 communities across Canada. Many of the new positions are based in Central and Western Canada.”

Now for context, CBC has about 3600 news journalists in television, radio and online. It’s long been underweighted in western Canada, likely because of where the television and radio stations were located decades ago when our demography was a lot more central Canadian. In British Columbia, for example, the private television broadcasters collectively outspend CBC television 7:1.

The CBC has also hired a new head of English language services to replace the retiring Barb Williams. The new EVP is Doug Smith. He’s arriving from Paramount Canada and his CV stretches back to ViacomCBS, Rogers, and Alliance Atlantis.

A streaming guy. Let’s give him a couple of years and see what he can conjure up at CBC Gem.

Maybe we’ll see a shift to buzzy blockbusters that emulate the recent success of Crave’s Heated Rivalry in Canada and abroad.

Making hit Canadiana television that is validated by successful export is not new: Canadian broadcasters have done it repeatedly with Transplant, Flashpoint, DaVinci’s Inquest, Degrassi, etc.

At home, Bell Media can take credit for a hitting streak of popular and authentic Canadian shows, smacking doubles like Shorsey, LetterKenny and Late Bloomer, and now Heated Rivalry, a centre-field blast worthy of Bo Bichette (sorry, too soon?).

There’s no reason CBC can’t do the same. It can and has (Sort Of was genius). But as a paid subscriber to Gem (how many of us is a secret), my personal request is to pour money into the functionality of the high friction, algorithmically anemic streaming site.

(Correction: An earlier version of this post identified the number of CBC newsroom employees at 3400.)

***

This year’s annual coven of Media Policy conspirators is scheduled in Toronto in the first weekend of February.

Digital Media at the Crossroads will be held at the Faculty of Music building, University of Toronto, on Friday 6th- Saturday 7th. Here’s the program. See you there.

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Australia does Canadian style news aid – Californian news subsidy flounders – Hollywood merger fight continues

West Wing‘s C.J. Cregg is doling out the cash in California

January 10, 2026

Australia is close to cutting cheques to news outlets under its News Media Assistance Program (“News MAP”), similar to Canada’s QCJO federal aid to journalism.

The highlights to News MAP are:

$99 million ($92M CDN) over a three year period.
$67 million is targeted for news outlets delivered as salary subsidies of $13,000 AUS ($12,000 CDN).
$33 million to the Australian Associated Press, similar in staff complement to our Canadian Press.
In addition to the $99 million, it’s anticipated that a one time $30M “innovation fund” will be announced in the next two months.

There are other, less headline grabbing, features:

$3M of government advertising committed to news outlets for the next two years, a symbolic rather than substantial sum, but the kind of program that has been touted in other countries (including Canada, where Ontario has committed $50M annually).
$10.5 million over 4 years, backdated to 2023, to the Australian Communications and Media Authority to implement a Media Diversity Measurement Framework. The ACMA has already released its first biennial report, a thoughtful document worth reading. It describes and analyses the state of news journalism in Australia.
A three-year study of media literacy, possibly leading to a national media literacy policy in Australia.

Per journalist, the Australian News MAP is worth to news outlets about half of the dollar value of the Canadian QCJO program.

The News MAP program is being launched under the uncertainty shadowing Australia’s flagship public policy for news journalism, the News Media Bargaining Code. The NMBC was the policy template for Canada’s Online News Act.

In 2024 Meta refused to renew its payments to Australian publishers and broadcasters (reputed to be a third of the $200M AUS contributed by Meta and Google). Presumably Google is considering its options.

That $200M AUS was about twice the value of the $100M CDN Google payment in Canada, for a country two-thirds our size, so you get the picture of how the combined Canadian and Australian programs for government subsidy and Big Tech payments are comparable, if asymmetric.

The Australian government is signalling that News MAP is truly a time limited three-year program. The Albanese government, strengthened by its majority-election victory in 2025, is moving forward with public consultations on proposed legislation that would strengthen its NMBC by assessing financial charges on Google and Meta, regardless of whether the tech companies escalate by banning news links on their platforms.

***

In 2024 MediaPolicy posted about the state of California’s attempt at imitating Canada’s Online News Act and Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code that compel Google and Meta to make mandatory licensing payments to news outlets.

The initial Californian scheme that earned the support of Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom was valued at $250M over five years, combining matching contributions form the state budget (akin to Canada’s QCJO program), Google dollars, existing philanthropic projects, and the possibility of a $62 billion tech fund to support AI tools in the newsroom.

Then California faced a budget crisis, whittling down its matching contribution to $10M annually. Google obliged by cutting its own. The AI innovation fund is grounded too.

The Californian bill can now be officially designated a debacle. Politico has a story on how that happened, here.

One of the key problems, still unresolved, is that even the $20M in matching state and Google funds remains undistributed to Californian news outlets. The University of Berkeley was initially contemplated as the gatekeeper but withdrew after the state rejected the journalism school’s plan for bespoke allocations to favoured projects and news outlets.

Then the program distribution landed with the state librarian. Then it was moved to the Governor’s office of development, headed by former Bill Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers (the real-life C.J. Cregg of West Wing). Now Myers is trying to set up a third party to distribute the funds, however her office will retain the final say on allocating the $20M.

News outlets haven’t seen any of the money and Governor Newsom’s final term in office ends in 2027.

***

Here’s an update on the battle between Netflix and Paramount to buy Warner Brothers’ studio and streaming businesses.

The board of Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD) has rejected a second Paramount bid, insisting that the Netflix offer is still better.

If the WBD board stays the course, there will not be any shareholder vote on the Paramount bid.

For WBD to go forward with the tentative deal with Netflix, Netflix must first get regulator approval of its bid document, send it to WBD shareholders, and then a special shareholder meeting will vote on the Netflix offer. Nothing is scheduled yet.

Paramount is focussing on persuading the WBD board, and shareholders, that WBD’s television assets that aren’t in the Netflix bid are worthless and Paramount’s offer is better because it takes those channels off the hands of shareholders.

If WBD and Netflix consummate their deal, the federal Department of Justice could consider an anti-trust court challenge.

***

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2026 will be Canada’s cage match

“GSP! GSP! GSP!”

December 31, 2025

You already knew it: Canada’s 2026 is going be a battle, a pivotal moment in our history.

CUSMA talks begin this spring. They will be brutal. Even in the innocent days of cross border free trade, the US played rough when it came to a trade dispute over Canadian culture.

This US President wants high tariff walls to keep Canadian goods out of America and to grab Canadian jobs. Going the other way he wants open borders and unregulated markets for US exports such as streaming services and social media apps.

Given the thousands of Canadian manufacturing jobs and family farms at stake in the trade talks, and the inevitable reprise of 51st state threats —-“we just have to have ~~Greenland~~ Canada”— it may seem parochial at first to focus on media policy. But with 660,000 jobs in our media and cultural sectors, focus I shall.

Here are some of the upcoming headlines.

The CUSMA trade talks

An internet meme recently popped up in my X feed that put two contemporaneous statements from Google spokespersons next to each other.

In the first, Google addressed the digital regulators of a foreign government —-in this case the European Union—- with the utmost respect. In the second statement to a much different forum, Google demanded US Congress stomp all over the EU.

This is how the tech bros roll. They’ve enlisted the Trump administration in their cause and the tiff with the EU has escalated from White House accusations of European censorship of American content to barring the architect of the EU Digital Services Act and four advocates of the EU regulating online hate and disinformation from travelling in the US.

Canada, you’re warned.

So no surprise, when CUSMA talks begin the US is going to come loud and hard against Canada regulating media in our own country, whether it’s the Online Streaming Act C-11 or the Online News Act C-18. I don’t have a high degree of confidence that PM Mark Carney won’t flush them like he did the carbon tax, the digital services tax, the emissions cap, etc.

It’s not that we shouldn’t reconsider Canadian media policy any time we want, but it would be better to do so because Canadians wish it. The polls say we don’t: at least not during the trade talks.

What’s at stake here is not only those two pieces of legislation, C-11 and C-18, but our right to take future action on any media policy that might cost the tech bros money or convenience. Think AI. Or online harms.

I make no prediction. On the one hand, as a banker and a corporate lifer I think Carney would happily throw cultural regulation under the bus.

On the other, if he does that he can kiss his Québec caucus goodbye. Or, the NDP might find its gag-point and bring down the Liberal minority government.

CanCon

I just can’t figure out the CRTC. The commissioners alternate between putting a bold $200 million cash levy on streaming services and, on the other hand, their timorous ruling on CanCon video content.

The Commission has three big decisions to release in the new year, arising out of the Online Streaming Act (having missed the December 2025 deadline set by cabinet).

The most consequential is the second instalment of the aforementioned CanCon video streaming ruling which will deal with issues that could carve out regulatory conditions for a generation:

How much money will Netflix and the California streamers have to spend on Canadian shows?

Will the Commission reduce CanCon spending for Canadian broadcasters (it will) and by how much?
Will the Commission swap out obligations for Canadian broadcasters to make CanCon dramas in favour of underwriting their unprofitable news operations?

The Commission owes us two other big ones in broadcasting distribution and audio streaming. There are lots of issues packed into those two rulings, but the one I am watching is whether the Commission will make Spotify and the music streamers grow the Canadian listening audience for Canadian artists (it’s currently less than 10%).

There are some wild cards in play.

The Federal Court heard the streamers’ appeal against the $200 million levy in June and judgment is overdue.

The legalities of appeal are narrow and amount to whether the Commission dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s. They don’t allow the streamers to easily challenge the CRTC’s wisdom on the size of the levies, nor what they are spent on (i.e. CanCon dramas and broadcast news).

Still, if the Court strikes down the levies on technical grounds just before the CUSMA talks begin it will significantly assist American negotiators or, if our Prime Minister’s climb down on the digital services tax is any guide, assist him in dumping trade ballast.

Another wild card is Québec’s new streaming law, Bill 109. It’s the CAQ’s claim to regulate streamers in case the federal CRTC disappoints on French language content on screens and AirPods.

When CUSMA talks begin, Québec’s bill will be sited in the same American crosshairs as the federal C-11. With a Parti Québécois election victory in the offing, and possibly another referendum on separation we could hear a lot more about this provincial law.

Next, we can speculate on whether Global TV News makes it to 2027 in one piece. Its parent company Corus refinanced its debt this year and managed to land some new television programming to replace the profitable Disney and Discovery content that Rogers poached from them.

But Corus still lives hand to mouth, and the news division loses a lot of money. The Shaw family ownership can’t find a Canadian buyer. Even Mark Carney wouldn’t dare exempt the 15-city Global News network from Canadian ownership rules and watch Fox or one of the other US television chains march in and set up shop in every major Canadian city.

The last question mark is a boutique policy issue but carries huge consequences for the survival of the Canadian film and television industry. The CRTC’s ruling that allows US streamers to own majority copyright in their new Canadian dramas turned four decades of Canadian cultural policy on its head.

The domino that might fall is whether the Liberal government would harmonize the CRTC’s new rules about the ownership of intellectual property in Canadian dramas with its own rules that govern federal subsidies to Canadian programs. The CRTC ruling invites American trade negotiators to demand it.

Online Harms

If Justice Minister Sean Fraser tables an online harms bill in Parliament, it will be time for some soul searching by all of us.

How seriously do we take the online harms of race-baiting and anti-semitic hate, humiliation of women and girls, and harm to our adolescent and teenage children? Are we virtue signalling our concern or do we really want to do something about it?

On the other hand, we shouldn’t be so naive to think that these platforms won’t err on the side of censorship rather than pay fines for permitting harmful content on their services. That’s the sort of malicious compliance Meta meted out by banning Canadian news from Facebook and Instagram rather than comply with the Online News Act.

You can see this debate play out in its beta-version with Bill S-209, tabled by an independent Senator. That bill is legislation that would require porn sites and social media apps to exclude minors from accessing hardcore porn by using third party age verification services.

Again, the harm is obviously serious, but how seriously do we take the harm? Even though the risks are remote, how much are we willing to gamble the privacy of porn site visitors and social media followers whose identities might be hacked and exposed?

All eyes will be on Australia which has grabbed global attention by banning teen access to social media, a move that requires age verification of adult social media accounts.

It would be guesswork to predict what happens next with the amazing explosion of AI technology, its impact on economic growth and social harm, and government efforts to regulate it.

The most pressing policy questions are in the hands of AI Minister Evan Solomon who has frequently telegraphed his reluctance to impede the development of Canada’s fledgling AI industry by “over indexed” regulations.

But neither has Solomon warmed to the Big Tech campaign to create an American-style “text mining” exception in Canadian copyright law. If he did, he would be sinking any chances that Canadian news organizations and cultural creators have to force AI giants into paying license fees for scraping online content to feed their products. Hugh Stephens has an excellent summary of the current state of affairs, here.

The worst case scenario for content creators is very bad but grimly not a lot worse than the best case scenario.

Even if AI companies submit to paying license fees —-and there have already been a few licensing agreements struck between AI companies and a select group of big news publishers and content creators—– it’s entirely possible that in the next five years AI will so disrupt the direct interface between news organizations and news consumers that news outlets will pine for the days when Google and Meta were taking their hyperlinks for free but at least sending audience traffic their way.

Either the US or Canada may raise AI commerce or the mitigation of its harms at the CUSMA bargaining table. The Trump administration appears to be all in for making American AI into the global masters of the Internet.

But as many have pointed out there is a back eddy at state-level where MAGA politicians are as concerned about AI harms as anyone.

CBC Radio-Canada

After the CBC’s near death experience in the last federal election, policy wonks everywhere had suggestions on how the public broadcaster might re-capture the popular imagination with a strong programming line-up that resonates across the entire country.

We’ve had a statement of intent from the new CBC President: more local news, especially in the West, but what else?

If the Prime Minister gives away the media policy store to the Americans, what the CBC does becomes even more important.

Bandwidth

Whatever the government wants to do on media and cultural policy in 2026, bandwidth could be a problem.

I don’t mean download speeds. I mean the administrative bandwidth in the federal Heritage Department. Bureaucrats will be on call 24/7 during trade talks; the department is already charged with developing legislation to overhaul the governance of the CBC; and there are any number of quiet policy reviews and projects going on.

This could be the busiest year ever for media and cultural policy and the unhappy timing of Steven Guilbeault’s exit from cabinet means that we have a rookie Heritage minister, Marc Miller (who may or may not be as invested in C-11 or C-18 as Guilbeault).

Compounding that lack of experience is Carney’s decision to shuffle the deputy ministers who do the grinding work of getting things done in government. Long time Heritage deputy Isabelle Mondou just got shuffled to the Privy Council Office. Good luck to the new guy, Francis Bilodeau.

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Canadians in a dangerous time.

December 28, 2025

I am ever grateful for my library card. After waiting just a few weeks for 100+ Torontonians to read this book before me, I got my turn with this new anthology of thirty Canadian artists and writers reacting to Donald Trump’s threats to crush our economy so he can annex our country.

Elbows Up! (subtitled “Canadian Voices of Resilience and Resistance”) is of course a riff on the Prime Minister’s election slogan that helped to put him where he is now. Whether in fact we are conducting ourselves that way is, I think it’s best to say, a work in progress.

The editor of this book, CBC host Elamin Abdelmahmoud, pitches the relevance of this collection as a cultural reboot of a similar publication in the turbulent year of 1968: The New Romans: Candid Canadian Opinions of the US.

The 2025 remake has less to say about the annexationist threat to the south than it does about being and feeling Canadian in dangerous times.

A few contributions stood out for me. Tom Power (the host of CBC’s radio show Q) offers a guileless and heart warming account of his journey from not-a-clue teenager to Newfoundlander patriot to passionate Canadian. The secret of his self discovery: sharing music, half-finished beers and sunrises with other dissolute musicians touring Canada. It’s a metaphor for community that anyone ought to find relatable, even if they find it in less dingy environments.

Author Iain Reid has a stunner of a short story (“The Appointment”) that is curiously de-contextualized from history and nationality. I’m not sure what it’s doing in this book, but it’s terrific.

Actor Jay Baruchel goes on a rant about how the American media juggernaut has smothered (English language) Canadian content. It’s hard for me to judge how good this piece is because that’s what I sound like all of the time, but I certainly nodded my head in agreement throughout. It should not be lost on readers that this book was published by a foreign book publisher because after years of foreign acquisitions the Canadian-owned press has been reduced to fighting for scraps.

But the disappointment I felt reading this book was its insularity. There’s not a single conservative voice. There’s one Québec writer. Presumably these missing voices, our fellow Canadians, have something to say in our moment of national peril.

Yet there are several contributions from writers who come from the cultural left perspective that Canada is not morally legitimate and, as a polity, is the perpetrator of a colonial and Euro-Caucasian supremacist domination of the powerless. Some of these pieces are well written and carry intellectual weight. But you can’t get to the end of this anthology without feeling that the project was put together for an audience demographic of about 20% of Canadians. That’s not the path to national resilience and resistance against annexation.

My last comment is that I want to point out the short, inspiring piece written by Dr. Jillian Horton who spoke to my innermost convictions and fears, and maybe your’s too:

It is our Canada.

We are a nation like almost every other —-built on violence, cruelty, oppression, as well as ingenuity, hard work, tenacity, community, faith, hope, and the sacrifices of those who came before us. But that is only one truth about us…a puzzle piece, not the whole story. That story has taken a turn at just the right moment. Sometimes saying what you will never become —-whether that is a fascist state or the 51st—- is the thing that brings the most clarity.

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I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Online harms bill is coming back – Canadians are alienated – Manitoba action on local media

(AI image)

December 23, 2025

The Online Harms bill is coming back to the House of Commons.

The Liberal Bill C-63 that died on the order table when the April 2025 federal election was called was initially a three-in-one omnibus.

It was an anti-hate bill that increased prison terms for existing Criminal Code hate speech offences and hate-motivated crimes as well as codifying the judge-made law on defining hate.

It also reinstated the abolished right of individuals to bring human rights complaints against hate speech.

And it charged social media companies with the responsibility of developing and enforcing safety practices to mitigate online harms, particularly to kids. This was the long expected policy piece that was born of lengthy public consultations, taking aim at Facebook and Instagram.

Michael Geist was right (he is, occasionally) in condemning C-63 as three controversial bills wedged into one. Others agreed and the Justice Minister Arif Virani split the legislation into two bills. But the election call killed them anyway and when the government reformed the new Justice Minister Sean Fraser messaged he wasn’t committed to C-63 as it stood.

Since then, Fraser has tabled bills that are policy-cousins to C-63. Bill C-9 takes up the supercharging of prison terms for hate-motivated offences, permits the police to charge hate offences without waiting for the green light from the Attorney-General, and picks up the judge-made law on defining hate (detestation or vilification is hate, but disdain or dislike is not.)

As part of a broader criminal justice reform, Fraser also introduced Bill C-16 to make it easier to prosecute blackmail threats of online sexual humiliation and deem the posting of deep fake sex videos a criminal act.

Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne’s Bill S-209, a proposal to use age verification technology to keep kids away from online porn, is paused in Senate committee but will probably re-emerge in February.

Now the Hill Times is reporting that Fraser will return some time in the new year with an online harms bill that may offer an organized government policy on online hate, harms and safety.

***

There are the standard ways that we like to take the temperature of public opinion on media.

The go to is whether one “trusts” media. Asked that simply, the polling outcomes reflect likes and dislikes of news outlets as much as reliability or manipulation.

I like this news outlet; I trust it. I hate this news outlet; I don’t trust it.

Occasionally pollsters try to dig a little deeper. The latest poll from Innovative Research doesn’t probe trust-in-media per se but rather the thing that drives trust and mistrust of public institutions: “cultural alienation,” a state of disengagement from the other, where the other is believed to be harmfully powerful.

The Innovative poll reports shocking levels of popular alienation from Canadian “elites” (another piece of terminology, like “trust,” that can barely shoulder the weight it is asked to bear).

As for the pollster, it describes “culturally alienated” thus: “A full-spectrum pessimistic bloc that believes Canada’s institutions are broken, elites are disconnected, our shared identity is lost, and the country is headed toward crisis. Their worldview is consistently bleak.”

According to the poll, there is a large pool of culturally alienated Canadians, about 28%.

The culturally alienated are joined in their disaffection by “anti-elite populists” who are “Canadians who feel strongly that the system is rigged and elites don’t care about ordinary people. They are less concerned with institutions or national identity collapsing.” That’s another 29%. I know a lot of people matching the description and I am guessing so do you.

Added together, the numbers look dire.

Now if that puts you into too dark a mood, keep in mind the poll was taken from a standing opinion panel of opted-in respondents, not a random sample of Canadians, so it is disproportionately asking questions of opinionated Canadians.

Also, the results might be skewed pessimistic by the questions. Many of the mood-testing questions are necessarily binary, asking respondents to answer yes or no to questions like “Canadian institutions are broken” and “Canadian elites don’t care about ordinary Canadians.”

Ask an emotional question, get an emotional answer.

I keep telling myself, it isn’t as bad as it looks. That makes me a moderate pessimist, apparently.

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An all-party committee of the Manitoban legislature is recommending Premier Wab Kinew’s NDP government follow the lead of provincial governments in Ontario and Québec to financially support local media.

If the NDP acts on the recommendation, it will copy the Ontario procurement practice of reserving 25% of $200 million in government ad spends for placement with local media.

Also, the MLAs propose that Manitoba offer a journalist salary subsidy similar to Québec which provides a 35% salary subsidy (up to $26,250 annually) that stacks on top of the federal 35% salary subsidy (up to $29,000).

***

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – CUSMA snooker – CRTC copyright ruling appealed – shareholder vote on Netflix v Paramount – the Oscars on YouTube

December 20, 2025

This week the US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told US Congress what American stakeholders want from CUSMA trade talks with Mexico and Canada in 2026.

Greer’s report was an opportunity to be performative about US interests. As a member of President Trump’s cabinet, he wasn’t offering a blueprint for trade negotiations or even hinting at what’s the most important to his boss.

Only Donald Trump knows what he really wants. Does he want to run the table and steamroll Canada and Mexico?

Well, imagine a snooker game with a full rack of balls on the felt. What strikes you immediately upon reading Greer’s report is how many meaty issues there are in a long list of industrial sectors.

For those concerned about Trump’s cultural hit list, you would be surprised how brief and perfunctory Greer’s comments were.

As we’ve known for some time, the US streamers hate our Online Streaming Act. Google and Meta hate our Online News Act. Prime Minister Mark Carney already gave away our digital services tax, the thing the US companies hated the most.

On the other hand, the American companies canvassed by Greer like the Digital Trade chapter in the CUSMA trade agreement just fine.

As a very permissive set of trade rules, it may be up to Canadian negotiators to carve out of the Digital Trade provisions a wider scope to exercise our sovereign right to set the terms of AI services.

***

In case you missed it, read my rant about the CRTC’s ruling on copyright and intellectual property in Canadian video content.

Sounds like a snoozer when I describe it that way, but Canadian ownership of CanCon copyright is central to whether the federal government’s Bill C-11 the Online Streaming Act accomplishes what it was meant to do.

My rant was that the CRTC effed it up. The Canadian Media Producers Association appears to agree: it just filed a court appeal against the ruling.

The CMPA’s legal filing, asking the federal court to hear its appeal, argues one of the things I wrote about in the blog post: Bill C-11 was written to ensure that Canadian TV and film producers reap the fruits of their labour, what industry insiders call the “long-term commercial exploitation of intellectual property.”

Mere copyright “in the title” of a show isn’t that, says the CMPA.

In the words of the statute, the Commission is supposed to consider whether Canadian producers enjoy “a right or interest in relation to a program, including copyright, that allows them to control and benefit in a significant and equitable manner from the exploitation of the program.”

That means revenue, in other words a stake in the profit earned by Canadian shows from distribution and other monetization opportunities until the lemon is squeezed dry.

***

This week the board of Warner Brothers Discovery rejected Paramount’s hostile takeover bid. That leaves the winning suitor Netflix as Hollywood Rex for now, but WBD shareholders vote on Netflix’s $82 billion offer in January.

Paramount isn’t rushing out an improved bid: CEO David Ellison is making the case to WBD shareholders for his all-cash bid, arguably better chances than Netflix of clearing anti-trust hurdles, and the fact that Netflix’s offer for the WBD studio and streaming assets doesn’t include taking WBD’s lagging television assets off the hands of shareholders.

In the meantime, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner withdrew from Paramount’s financing consortium. Then business analysts questioned whether Larry Ellison’s money was good: his participation in his son David’s takeover bid is through a revocable trust, subject to change by Ellison senior. (Update, 22/12/25 – Ellison Sr. responds with personal guarantee).

Almost unnoticed in all of this, Pa Ellison is now officially a part-owner of TikTok-USA after the Chinese company ByteDance completed the sale of its American operations to a consortium of US interests, including Ellison.

***

Netflix may be the undisputed king of streaming. But YouTube is the lord of video consumption.

YouTube’s market dominance is a reflection on the growing popularity of short-form video of course. Yet not long ago I posted about YouTube’s plan to go all out into bidding for the rights to big events in premium, long-form video.

Last week YouTube scooped the exclusive global rights to the Oscar awards, beginning in 2029. That seems like a big deal for boomers raised on Hollywood glamour, although we could remind ourselves that at 20 million viewers, the Oscars trail the Super Bowl (130 million) and Game 7 of the World Series (50 million).

No word yet on the consequences for Bell Media’s CTV network which has held the Canadian distribution rights for the Oscars since 2003.

***

There’s a new American opinion poll published by Pew Research which rattled my optimism about the future of news journalism.

According to the poll, young people are more likely than older Americans to trust news influencers, concede a wide definition of who they recognize as a journalist, and are more likely to find it acceptable for journalists to be advocates for a cause and sport their ideological colours brightly.

***

The Washington Post’s newest AI widget (proprietor Jeff Bezos holds a minority interest in the AI app Perplexity) is in Beta. It has a long, long way to go.

A six minute daily podcast features two AI agents summarizing WAPO’s top three stories of the day. You can customize your topics or WAPO’s algorithm will figure you out.

Other than saving on two journalist salaries, the added value of this AI widget is a mystery. It’s a downmarket product offering from an upmarket news outlet.

Real life podcasters at the NYT Daily, fear not.

***

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved.

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Québec’s Netflix-Spotify bill is in play – social media ban for teens – hostile bid for Warner Bros and CNN – OpenAI’s Disney video app

AI generated image from OpenAI

December 13, 2025

This week the Québec National Assembly unanimously passed Bill 109, its version of the federal Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act.

MediaPolicy has been following this file since the CAQ government commissioned a blue-ribbon committee to recommend how to reverse the low availability and consumption of French language content on global streaming platforms. In reverse chronological order, you can update yourself on this story here, here, here and here.

The CAQ bill is a policy response to the federal cabinet’s and the CRTC’s hesitancy to implement the “content discoverability” provisions of the federal bill as written by Parliament.

The political consensus in Québec on regulating audio-visual and audio content to protect culture and language meant that Bill 109 didn’t spark the controversy that the federal Bill C-11 did two years ago.

But the tinder is dry and the sparks will fly.

The US Trade Representative will add Bill 109 to its list of American grievances over Canada regulating Hollywood streamers and Big Tech, to be tabled in CUSMA negotiations this spring. (When coincidentally the 2026 Québec election might be called).

So too there must inevitably be an impasse between the Mark Carney government and Québec over legislative jurisdiction. Though brief by comparison, Bill 109 is almost a carbon copy of Bill C-11. Until the Supreme Court says otherwise, Ottawa has exclusive jurisdiction over online broadcasting.

Québec’s culture minister Mathieu Lacombe has been pretending there’s nothing jurisdictional to talk about with Ottawa. According to the minister, there’s no conflict, only concurrent federal and provincial powers to do the same thing. Good luck with that. A caveat: he might have a provincial claim to the regulation of home screens on Smart TVs and streaming devices.

The Québec law is founded on a provincially claimed right to cultural discovery —props to that boldness. Importantly, all of the bill’s cultural measures are focussed on French language content, not Canadian French language content, so the political framing is more linguistic than cultural.

Mess with this if you dare, Ottawa.

From here, things will move slowly at first.

Québec will establish the minister’s Discoverability Office and begin drafting streamer requirements for French language content.

The CAQ’s Lacombe will find out if the streamers are willing to take up his offer to negotiate bespoke agreements in order to avoid cookie cutter regulations set by the province.

On video streaming, he will no doubt benchmark his regulations or voluntary agreements with streamers against the outcomes reached in France since 2021.

Despite a framework EU law that proposes a 30% catalogue minimum (numbers of shows), the French implementation of that policy focusses instead on production investments in French language content, based on a range of 20% to 25% of a streamer’s national operating revenues. So far, the result has been bigger budgets rather than a proliferation of mid-budget shows.

On other hand Lacombe could just stick with catalogue quotas, as the CRTC is expected to announce its own federal expenditure quotas soon.

As the Québec legislation doesn’t require the cash contributions to Canadian media funds that the streamers hate so much in the federal scheme, a deal with Netflix focussing on French language video catalogues doesn’t seem out of the question.

A deal with Spotify to do something dramatic to increase rock bottom consumption of French language music would be tougher.

Unless Lacombe’s process moves at lightning speed, CUSMA talks and the Québec election will intervene.

***

If you don’t have school age kids, you might have missed the seismic Big Tech event that just shook Australia: its government has banned social media accounts for children under age 16.

Social media companies are expected to rely on age estimation technology but also photo ID.

The Australian communications minister Anika Wells is the first politician in a liberal democracy to tell social media companies, “time’s up.” Apparently so, even Elon Musk says he will obey the law.

There’s a brief explainer in the New York Times on how harmful social media can be for teens and how we got to the point that Big Tech’s safety half-measures have worn out the patience of legislators.

Still, a ban. Wow. As our federal justice minister Sean Fraser eyes a revised online harms bill, what would be interesting is an opinion poll on a ban, taken from Canadian parents of tweeners and teenagers, parsed out separately for age and gender of the children.

***

In last weekend’s post, I speculated that Donald Trump would have some fun with the $87 billion USD Netflix-Warner Brothers merger deal, given his donor ties to the losing bidder, Paramount.

The next business day after Netflix officially announced its winning bid, and media analysts had their say on the prospects for Netflix obtaining the Trump administration’s anti-trust vetting, Paramount unveiled its Plan B: a $108 billion hostile takeover bid for all of Warner Brothers Discovery properties.

Warner Brothers has a week to respond but Paramount CEO David Ellison has already signalled an improved second bid is ready to go.

Among Paramount’s financial backers are the CEO’s dad and second richest man in the world, Larry Ellison, and various gulf state sovereign wealth funds. Oh, and President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The Ellison-Gulf-Kushner bid includes Warner Brothers’ television entertainment channels and the cable news network CNN.

Ellison-the-younger’s Paramount recently bought the CBS news network and appointed the Free Press’ Bari Weiss as CEO. Pa Ellison is also the key investor in the bid to buy TikTok’s US operations.

***

A significant AI content licensing deal has been struck between the IP-rich Disney and OpenAI, the developers of Chat GPT and the video-creation app Sora.

The deal will allow Sora subscribers to create videos with Disney’s classic animated film characters. Imagine making a birthday video card for your kids featuring them with their preferred cuddly creature or action hero.

As reported by The New York Times: “Sora users will be able to make videos with more than 200 characters from Disney’s library, including from “Encanto,” “Frozen,” “Moana,” “Toy Story,” “Zootopia,” “Inside Out” and other animated movies. Animated or illustrated versions of Marvel characters like Deadpool, Iron Man and Black Panther will also be available, along with “Star Wars” characters like Darth Vader and Princess Leia.”

Given all of the chatter about AI companies scraping copyrighted content, the Disney-OpenAI deal will set expectations that licensing deals are the way for Big Tech to make peace with content producers, especially the biggest ones. (Oddly the reporting on the deal noted Disney’s $1B USD investment in OpenAI but was mum on the value of licensing payments that Disney can expect).

The Hollywood Reporter has a good analysis of the deal, the gist of which is Disney isn’t going to rest on its IP laurels while other content companies get rich on AI monetization.

More broadly, the slow drip of licensing deals between AI and content companies might, in the news journalism space, begins to look like the years leading up to Australia’s NewsMedia bargaining code and the Canadian Online News Act: AI companies cherry pick the biggest and most popular news outlets for licensing deals while those left behind look to governments for action on content scraping and monetization.

***

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved.

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Netflix is Rex – Miller is minister – CRTC vets Meta’s news ban

AI image

December 7, 2025

This week’s blockbuster news is that Netflix edged out Paramount to buy Warner Brothers for $82 USD billion. The deal immediately depleted the supply of adjectives at the disposal of media analysts.

If the deal closes as scheduled in late 2026, Netflix buys up the world’s biggest movie archive and keeps it out of the hands of a major rival with the second biggest (Netflix is number three).

Netflix is paying a heavy price tag and arguably overpaid (you know who pays for inflated merger valuations, it’s subscribers and workers). Netflix goes from its status as the streaming industry’s 900-pound gorilla to, I dunno, T-Rex stature?

The public commentary on the deal is mostly doomsaying.

It speeds up the chiselling of the tombstone for the theatrical release industry.

In a press release, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos said shareholder value would flow from adding HBO and the full Warner Brothers archive to the Netflix “best in class streaming service:” his pro forma commitment to theatre release was relegated to a subordinate sentence clause.

But if the merciless dispatch of theatrical-release seems inevitable, and just the law of the marketplace jungle, what is of long term concern is the anti-competitive effect on the pipeline of big-budget premium video entertainment. The Globe & Mail’s Barry Hertz has a good analysis here.

The Netflix deal is a prime candidate for anti-trust review by the Trump administration (especially as Netflix outbid Friend-of-Trump Paramount).

That review could go in any direction but things to watch for include (a) Trump reviving his threat to levy tariffs on foreign movies and the offshore shooting of Hollywood blockbusters, and/or (b) using the anti-trust hammer to get something that he personally wants, which could be commitments to US-based production or some vanity trophy we can’t imagine right now.

It’s not that Sarandos can’t see that coming. In his press release he said the acquisition would allow Netflix to expand its US based production, a gimme that doesn’t commit him to a rate of new releases equal to “Netflix plus Warner Brothers” but only “Netflix plus a dollar.”

Any Trump-driven re-shoring of studio production could hurt the two offshore leaders of Hollywood production, the UK and Canada (and hurt Hollywood too, but that’s a longer discussion).

Beyond that, the effect on Canadian-owned broadcasting could be massive. Netflix is buying Warner Brothers’ Home Box Office streaming service and catalogue which may or may not be integrated into the Netflix platform, once subscription pricing is figured out. The press release suggests HBO content will be on the Netflix platform, at least in the US.

Here in Canada, there is no HBO streaming service and Bell Media holds the exclusive license to distribute HBO on the only Canadian streaming service of consequence, Crave TV.

You would have to question whether Netflix has any interest in continuing that Canadian licensing arrangement when it expires and, in fact, Netflix has an excellent opportunity to severely wound its only Canadian-owned competitor.

Without that profitable HBO content, Bell’s ability to keep funding Canadian content takes a big hit.

***

Canada has a new Heritage minister, Marc Miller.

That’s the fallout from Steven Guilbeault’s cabinet resignation over Prime Minister Mark Carney scrapping the Trudeau/Guilbeault policies on oil production, emissions, pipelines, oil tankers and clean energy regulations.

Miller continues a long tradition of the Liberals appointing an MP from the island of Montréal to the Heritage portfolio.

But of course Miller is the first anglophone the Libs have picked for that job since Hamilton’s Shiela Copps —-who was born ready to butt heads with the US on cultural sovereignty. She did the job from 1996 to 2003 under Prime Minister Jean Chrétien.

The feisty Miller is prone to speaking with candour, as a rule. That’s already got him into a spat with CAQ premier François Legault who didn’t like Miller insisting on making a distinction between “the decline” and “fragility” of the French language in Canada and Québec. The Bloc dutifully piled on.

Guilbeault was the federal champion of Canadian and French language content in Québec and as the new Heritage minister no less will be expected of Miller. His life will get very interesting in about six months when CUSMA negotiations begin.

Will Miller become the political reincarnation of Shiela Copps? It’s up to Mark Carney, just as it was up to Jean Chrétien.

***

It looks like the CRTC’s investigation into whether Meta is selectively enforcing its made-in-Canada ban on news content has come an end. The CRTC’s brief discharge letter to Meta was published last week.

You can still find news items on Facebook and Instagram in Canada, despite Meta’s avowal that it banned news to take itself outside of the scope of the compulsory licensing of “news content” in the Online News Act.

Meta must have satisfied the Commission staff that it is sticking to its ban by taking down news items posted by Canadian users and by deleting user screenshots of articles. If you want to know how the Commission reached its conclusion, you won’t find it in the letter.

What remains unresolved, or perhaps resolved only to the Commission’s private satisfaction, is Meta permitting posts from news outlets like Narcity and The Peak who successfully applied to Meta for what they describe as “exemptions” from the news content ban.

Without more transparency, one can only guess if Meta’s exemption of hand picked news outlets violates the statutory prohibition against digital platforms discriminating for or against selected news outlets.

In the case of Narcity, its publisher claimed that Meta granted an exemption because Narcity was refused certification for federal journalism labour tax credits on the grounds that it doesn’t publish enough original news on current affairs.

But certification for federal subsidies program doesn’t mean that a news outlet isn’t producing some news content, or pieces of news content, as defined by the Online News Act, which Meta says its banning to avoid paying for it.

The Peak also recently announced that Meta gave it “an exemption” and I invite you to have a look at the news articles it’s allowed to post on Facebook and Instagram.

If you go looking, keep in mind that the “news content” that Meta is supposed to be banning in order to escape the gravitational pull of the Act includes “any portion” of news content.

The Commission’s original inquiry into the news ban appears to have been its own idea, so the fact that it hasn’t published its reasons at any length is not a total surprise. No Canadian news organization has filed a complaint.

***

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved.

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Ranting about CanCon – Danish news subsidies – Meta lobbies Feds on age verification – the NFB’s gripping sailing documentary

November 29, 2025

I’ve fallen behind on catching you up on media policy news because I felt compelled to write a series of three posts commenting on the CRTC’s ruling on Canadian content. The last one, the rant I promised, was published this week in Cartt.ca.

While I was ranting, one of the things I let slide was telling you about a new report out of Denmark proposing to refashion its policy design for government aid to news journalism.

The Danes are serious about news subsidies: they spend 540 million krone ($120M CDN) every year on private media in nation of six million people (Canada spends about $200 million in country of 42 million).

According to the Reuters Oxford Digital News Report, Denmark’s “public trust in media” score is 56% and it ranks sixth out of 180 in the Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom index at 86.93. By comparison, Canada’s trust score is 39% with a press freedom index of 78.5, 21st in the world.

The Danes also have something we don’t: a 2018 Media Liability law that established an independent national press council and conferred the force of law on editorial independence from ownership.

The Danish subsidy report was commissioned by government and written by a committee led by Rasmus Nielsen, the former chief of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Despite the ocean separating us, there are strong parallels between the Danish system of news subsidy and Canada’s jigsaw of federal programs: we have the QCJO subsidy of journalist salaries, the Local Journalism Initiative that funds 700 full time reporters in under-serviced regions across the country, and the Canadian Periodical Fund which supports editorial expenditures by community weeklies.

The untranslated 144-page Danish report covers a lot of ground, but Nielsen’s own English language summary of it captures the essence: a weighted emphasis on supporting news outlets that are regional, local or “independent” (owners of single-titles) rather than mere incumbency as a news organization.

***

The Senate deliberations of Senatrice Julie Miville-Dechêne’s Bill S-209, that would require age verification for online pornography is on hold until February while the Senate justice committee deals with other matters.

During the pause, the Canadian Press reports that Meta has joined the fray by lobbying the federal Liberals to step in with their own bill that would shift the age verification responsibility from pornography websites and social media platforms to app stores.

Meta obviously doesn’t run an App Store, as do Google and Apple, and the latter two Big Tech companies are cheesed about what Meta is up to.

Meanwhile, Canadian children continue to be exposed to online pornography featuring choking and slapping. The CP story is well done and informative.

Meta is having a good month of course. It won the anti-trust trial brought by the US Justice Department that claimed Meta was running a monopoly in personal social networking. In the interim five year period between filing and judgment, TikTok greatly improved its market share.

Matt Stoller has a very good analysis of the lawsuit, the trial, the judge, and why he thinks Big Tech will never be slowed down by anti-trust litigation: he says it takes public policy and legislatures to change things.

A test of his theory may happen soon: the trial judge in the Google Ad Tech case will be handing down her decision on whether to dismantle that illegal monopoly in the new year.

Meanwhile a consortium of US school boards just filed a new lawsuit against Meta and several other Tech companies.

Their allegation against Meta in particular is that company documents reveal CEO Mark Zuckerberg squelched evidence of harm to teenage girls while Meta designed lax safety features, including ineffective measures to expel sex traffickers from the platform. Of course, the allegations must be proven in court, probably over several years.

This does raise the question of whether Americans (and Canadians) should count on US courts to adjudicate Big Tech’s excesses by giving full due process and demanding conclusive evidence of the allegations, or whether governments should just cut to the chase, stop litigating whether the harms to kids persist, and legislate a solution.

In related stories, Australia’s social media ban on under 16s comes into force in December. The EU Parliament just passed a non-binding resolution to do the same.

***

The National Film Board’s website is recommending “Ghosts of the Sea,” a riveting documentary about the ill-fated Norwegian father-and-son sailors, Peter and Thomas Tangvald.

The filmmaker is Thomas’ half sister Virginia, who settled in her mother’s hometown of Montreal. The father Peter was married seven times and two of his wives died at sea.

I’ll say this: the film offers a visceral take on “intergenerational trauma.”

I think you will enjoy the one hour and 37 minute film and I absolutely guarantee you’ll have strong opinions afterwards.

***

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

The CRTC’s ruling on television copyright: for a branch-plant CanCon economy

November 27, 2025

In October 2022 Netflix was appearing at the Senate committee reviewing the proposed Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act, when the Conservative senator Fabian Manning pitched a softball question: what was the Hollywood giant’s “main priority” in amending a bill it didn’t welcome?

The Canadian spokesperson for the streamer was succinct in his answer: “If I had to choose just one, it would be the issue of copyright ownership.”

Last week, Netflix got what it wanted.

Continue reading at Cartt.ca…

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