Catching Up on MediaPolicy.ca – TekSavvy’s Gambit – ‘The Perfect Story’ of Ismael – Google subpoenaed by MPs

March 4, 2023

There is as yet no news about final approval or rejection of the Rogers-Shaw merger by ISED Minister François-Philippe Champagne. Possibly he will keep us guessing right up until the March 31st financing ‘deadline’ set by the two telcos.

Filling in the dramatic pause is TekSavvy’s complaint to the CRTC that the wireline and wireless network sharing arrangements made between Rogers and Vidéotron for British Columbia and Alberta is an illegal sweetheart deal.

The legal briefs from all and sundry are filed now. TekSavvy wants (a) to void the arrangements or (b) give TekSavvy the same deal as Vidéotron or (c) give all independent ISPs lower wholesale prices and full network access across the country.

MediaPolicy explains, here.

Also, Konrad Yakabuski has a good perspective piece on the merger approval itself.

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You may have missed Canadian journalist Michelle Shepherd’s documentary The Perfect Story released last year. It’s about Ismael Abdulle, a Somali teenager brutalized by Al-Shabab whose story inspired Shepherd’s reporting. No spoilers here, but the perfect story of the perfect refugee has a twist and an unexpected emotional punch.

Shepherd’s focus on Ismael and his story is unswerving when it could easily have been about the journalist and that tension hangs over the entire project.

You can watch for free on the NFB site.

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Google’s provocative censorship of news searches resulted in the Heritage Commons Committee meeting this week to summons senior Google executives to appear before MPs, with internal documents relevant to the manipulation of their news algorithm.

The Globe & Mail coverage of the Committee meeting tells you what you need to know.

The meeting is set for Monday March 6th. As of today it seems that top American officials are going to defy the MPs’ summonses, which have no extraterritorial power, leaving their Canadian employees Sabrina Geremia and Jason Kee to take the heat.

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We are all drawn to dramatic inflection points in studying trends and there is another one coming up soon in the shifting market of global advertising revenues.

It’s expected in the next two years that the soaring ad revenues of Amazon —-in third place of US digital ad revenues behind Google and Facebook—- will surpass the market share of all ad revenues earned by every newspaper and magazine publisher combined. In the world.

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