Author: Howard Law

November 5, 2023

This week The Logic broke the story that the Liberals’ long promised and studied Online Safety Bill has been handed over for Parliamentary sponsorship from Heritage to Justice. The legislation would be the third in the federal government’s Internet trilogy, following the Online Streaming Act Bill C-11 and the Online News Act Bill C-18.

The story suggested that responsibility had been transferred, but not the actual file, citing terse statements from Heritage and Justice communications officials. The take-away may be that the Liberals have bumped the legislation to the back of the Parliamentary queue.

***

English-reading Canadians may not be aware that it was a disastrous week for mainstream media in Québec.

The Québecor-owned television network TVA laid off 547 employees, one-third of its staff. Of those, 98 jobs are being cut from its regional stations in Trois Rivières, Lac St.Jean/Saguenay, Rimouski/South Shore and Sherbrooke. Announcements suggest those stations will move to a central casting model with one news broadcasting studio in Québec City servicing the regional bureaus. Also, TVA is eliminating its in-house produced entertainment programming and will acquire independent productions instead. The Montréal studio will be sold and rehoused in Québecor’s Journal de Montréal building. The real estate housing the regional studios may also go on the market. Broadcast Dialogue has a thorough report.

In print journalism, Transcontinental has terminated home delivery of its Publisac product —-flyer packs in plastic bags that piggyback free community newspapers— in response to Montréal’s ban on unsolicited mail and Canada Post’s competing Admail service (which is carrying on despite the municipal ban). News outlets may move to drop boxes.

The double-whammy has gripped political debate in Québec. Premier François Legault has promised unspecified provincial support for media in the Spring budget.

***

The dwindling 2023 calendar means deadlines on a couple of big media files, the first being the threat of Google’s throttle of Canadian news in response to Bill C-18.

The other deadline is that Canada’s Digital Services Tax comes into effect at the new year. The DST is the $900 million corporate tax on Big Tech multinationals that are strategically evading nation-by-nation tax liabilities.

MediaPolicy.ca has been following this file off and on: the US has broken its agreement to adopt the comprehensive OECD agreement on minimum corporate taxes owing to implacable opposition from House Republicans. Most countries have agreed to suspend their plans for the national Digital Services taxes pending replacement by an OECD deal. Canada has not (and Britain and France refuse to repeal their own).

The US Ambassador to Canada David Cohen has been dutifully shaking his fist at Canada, promising trade retaliation and a “big fight” in spite of the US failing to ratify the original OECD agreement. Recently, he more temperately conceded that Canada’s tax was “not crazy.”

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland is being temperate as well, quoted by Reuters as saying she is “cautiously optimistic” that a deal can be reached.

According to news reports there have been attempts to re-negotiate the OECD deal —-presumably to give US President Biden another chance to win Republican support—- described by The Logic as “grinding along slowly.” In any event, it’s difficult to image House Republicans agreeing to accommodate Biden on anything over the next twelve months running up to the November 2024 elections, so hold on to your hat.

The Digital Services Tax has been endorsed by the Conservative Party and was a central plank in its cultural platform in the 2021 federal election, “to make web giants pay their fair share.”

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If you are looking for new reading material on media, MediaPolicy just reviewed Hugh Stephens’ “In Defence of Copyright” here, which was unexpectedly fun reading.

Another compelling read is former WarnerMedia and Hulu CEO Jason Kilar’s speculation on what a successful streaming video business model might look like if US studios are to emerge from the disruption of the cable TV model.

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November 3, 2023

If ‘The Copyright Channel’ was a television show, no one would watch it. Too cerebral by half.

Yet the rights of media creators and sellers —contested by the public’s eager and unlicensed consumption of content— keep popping up in any number of the pressing media policy issues of the day. High-budget movies are pirated. Studio music is illicitly streamed or downloaded. Google can re-publish a portion of a book without the author’s consent. Universities provide free course materials to students after eluding the Copyright Act’s licensing framework to compensate individual authors. Even the Online News Act Bill C-18 involves copyright issues.

University of Calgary academic Hugh Stephens thinks this state of affairs is kind of nuts. “It is a sad commentary on today’s state of affairs,” he begins his new book In Defence of Copyright, “that there is a need for a book defending copyright.”

Stephens might not have written this book 15 years ago. But a lot has changed in the world of intellectual property. One thing is the technological capacity of content sharing software and the Internet trade in pirated digital goods. Another thing is the 2012 amendment to Canada’s Copyright Act that boosted the public’s opportunity to possess copyrighted works they don’t pay for, so long as it is claimed the works are being consumed for “private research and study.”

The origin of “intellectual property”—at least in the English-speaking world— goes back centuries in British common law and is thought to begin with John Locke’s concept of property, that humans mix their labour in nature and produce an inalienable invention (clear a forest, invent the telephone, write the great Canadian novel). But the “property” metaphor has never completely taken hold: perhaps it’s easier to prove a thief stole a goat rather than the expression of an idea.

At its roots, Stephens reminds us, copyright fosters the economic incentive of creators to come up with a good idea, express it in recognizable form, and spend the commercial winnings on the next invention. Unlike the goat, absolute ownership of intellectual property doesn’t exist: copyright expires after a century and even before that it can be lawfully purloined for “private research and study.” Free goat’s milk, as it were.

The fun thing about Stephens’ book is he’s a good writer and a better storyteller. You won’t be bored and your eyes won’t glaze over on the technical descriptions of copyright (he doesn’t dive too deep into the legal stuff, for that you might check out Lesley Harris’ Canadian Copyright Law.)

One story he tells with evident frustration is the successful dismantlement of the tariffed royalties that Canadian universities used to pay to authors for the licensed distribution of their educational materials to students. The Supreme Court of Canada allowed universities to withdraw from this collective licensing regime administered under the federal government’s copyright board, leaving hundreds of individual authors the option to hire lawyers to sue for copyright infringement. The universities, Stephens notes, now pay as much in administrative costs to manage their infringement liabilities as they did in royalties.

The university’s victory was celebrated by advocates of “users’ rights,” most volubly by the University of Ottawa’s Michael Geist. Stephens is miffed by academics who lean hard against copyright while drawing public salaries to support their own writing:

Many copyright holders are determined to protect their economic interests. After all, for many, it is their sole or primary livelihood…But for some authors, economic return is not their primary consideration. Many are academics who are paid to undertake and publish research. You might say that it is part of their day job. Many of these academics are also in the forefront of opposition to strong copyright laws from a philosophical perspective, arguing that copyright law gets in the way of the free sharing of knowledge. It is easy to argue for free information if your work is subsidized in some other way.

Stephens footnotes that paragraph to the Creative Commons project whose sponsors advocate for authors to pre-emptively license their work for free public distribution. That includes an endorsement from famed Canadian author Cory Doctorow:

As a writer, my problem is not piracy, it’s obscurity, and [Creative Commons] licenses turn my books into dandelion seeds, able to blow in the wind and find every crack in every sidewalk, sprouting up in unexpected places.

I would just note here that I paid full price for my copy of Mr. Doctorow’s last book.

Where next? The importance of copyright, and campaigns to limit it, is likely to intensify again with the surge of content-scraping Artificial Intelligence products made available on Tech platforms. Stephens’ book is a good preparation for that debate.

***

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Corus Entertainment Q3 Report 2022-23

October 29, 2023

Last week MediaPolicy.ca posted twice.

The first was a take on the stand-off between Google and the federal government over the Online News Act Bill C-18 and the pending throttle of Canadian news on Google’s search engine. I had been saving up my thoughts about the Bill for several weeks and have spilled them in this longer article that was originally published by the Institute for Research on Public Policy.

The other post speculated on how Heritage Minister Pascale St.-Onge might edit the government’s policy guidelines to the CRTC on implementing the Online Streaming Act, Bill C-11. Practically speaking, the government can use a Policy Direction to nudge the CRTC towards outcomes such as equitable contributions by US streamers, regulatory relief for Canadian broadcasters, the definition of a Canadian program for the purpose of subsidies and regulatory obligations, and the discoverability of online Canadian content through platform “recommendations.”

Shortly after the latter MediaPolicy post, Heritage Canada published the public comments it received on its draft Policy Direction. The comments mostly reiterate points debated over the last three years, beginning with the tabling of Bill C-10 in November 2020 and continuing through written submissions to the CRTC this July. I counted 991 comments (not 1400 as I reported earlier) submitted by close to 400 organizations and individuals. So if you want to read them, knock yourself out.

This space has tracked most of these issues over the last three years, but there were at least two issues that I hadn’t noticed before.

The first is how the independent Canadian television producers who supply most of the Canadian programs to licensed broadcasters, especially the CBC, are under siege from all sides.

It is old news that Netflix and the other US studios and streamers are asking for radical changes to the current definition of a Canadian program. Their proposed changes would allow them to supplant Canadian creatives with Hollywood talent. They would also strip Canadian producers of the opportunity to retain the long term licensing rights to the shows they make for Canadian broadcasters but also in the future for US streamers commissioning their own Canadian content.

Now Canadian broadcasters Corus Entertainment and Blue Ant are looking for some kind of roll back of regulatory rules obliging them to commission independent producers to make 75% of their dramas and documentaries, instead of allowing the broadcasters to commission their own affiliated production divisions (for example, the Corus-owned Nelvana).

The Commission has yet to announce dates to consider the definition of Canadian programming but when it does it will be a historic debate.

Another issue that I fished out of the public comments was pointed out by ASDIQ (representing French language independent music labels) and the Montréal based Coalition for the Diversity of Cultural Expression (CDEC). They note that the government’s draft Policy Direction appears to ignore Parliament’s explicit mandate to the CRTC regarding streaming platforms making “recommendations” of Canadian content. The Policy Direction currently employs the softer terminology of “discoverability” and “showcasing.” The streamers argue that ought to be restricted to offline promotion and no changes to their current set up of online tabs and search tools. Michael Geist’s submission is that so far no other country has required streamers to use recommendation tools (although the extensive discoverability obligations in France include “programme recommendations.”)

We should see the Minister’s final version of the regulation before the Commission begins Phase One of public hearings on the implementation of C-11 beginning November 20th.

***

Over the next few months (and years) we will hear more about Online Safety and Artificial Intelligence Large Language Models (for example, ChatGPT and its competitors).

The Liberals have promised an Online Safety Bill that will make the heated debates over Bills C-11 and C-18 look mild by comparison. We have the advantage of the British moving first with their own legislation which was recently passed into law and caused quite a stir. Here’s a brief BBC explainer.

The public policy issues for AI are just beginning to be identified and promise to be as endless as the Internet. Aside from the apocalyptic fears for public safety, there are the familiar issues around copyright. That includes the rights of countless content creators whose material is scraped by AI companies for profit. Lawsuits are proliferating.

AI companies themselves will push for copyright protection for their machine-made output, a challenge for copyright laws that only concede the protection of intellectual property to human beings.

***

The CRTC announced it is favourably disposed towards granting a request from the financially struggling Corus Entertainment to scale back its licence obligation to commission and broadcast dramas and documentaries.

Subject to public comment, the Commission may allow Corus to reduce its spending on generally unprofitable “Programs of National Interest” from 8.5% to 5% of television revenues. The 3.5% would be spent on more profitable Canadian shows it broadcasts on its family, lifestyle and unscripted drama channels.

CEO Doug Murphy was quoted in Cartt.ca as saying a favourable CRTC ruling would “provide the much-needed flexibility in our content planning and spending for the coming years by letting us focus more on producing the best content that drives our linear and digital businesses.”

Corus has been asking for a regulatory break for some time and is pointing to its steep decline in cash-flow as the justification (allowing the Commission to deflect the inevitable “me too” demands from Bell, Rogers and Québecor).

The context to this latest development is that the CRTC has parked multiple requests from Canadian broadcasters to immediately reduce their Canadian programming obligations. Those demands are going to be taken up by the Commission in its major public proceeding over implementation of Bill C-11. In fact the Commission imposed an “administrative” extension of broadcasting licences (and Canadian programming obligations) until August 2026 to maintain the status quo during that lengthy proceeding. That has Bell marching off to the Federal Court on the grounds that the Commission cannot do so without a public hearing.

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October 24, 2023

Big Tech’s news throttle looks headed to a December end game when the Online News Act, Bill C-18, comes into force. Facebook has already choked off Canadian news and now Google has reissued its list of demands.

Facebook’s blocking of Canadian news harms both news outlets and readers alike, although it should be seen in the global perspective: Axios reports that post-2020 Facebook and Twitter referrals of reader traffic to top global news sites are sinking like a stone.

Most people following Meta are convinced that Canadian news on Facebook isn’t coming back. We are therefore left with the blame game of whether CEO Mark Zuckerberg or Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ought to be held responsible.

What’s less debatable is the fact that Facebook will no longer balance its distribution of misinformation in Canada with reliable news and therefore will devolve into a platform – if you will excuse the hackneyed phrase – for fake news.

As for Google’s threats of a news throttle, it may come down to the wire: one gets the feeling from recent developments that December will see some deadline bargaining between the Canadian heritage minister, who is responsible for the Act, and the Google C-Suite.

At the moment, neither party is flinching. …

Read the complete article at Policy Options

October 24, 2023

The broadcasting community is still waiting for Heritage Minister Pascale St.Onge to finalize the terms of the federal cabinet’s Policy Direction to the CRTC on implementing the Online Streaming Act, Bill C-11.

Cabinet Policy Directives, authorized by the statute, provide an opportunity for the government of the day to send veiled hints to the CRTC in the guise of broad policy statements on the action points emerging from the new legislation.

St.Onge’s predecessor in the Heritage portfolio, Pablo Rodriguez, floated his draft Policy Direction on June 10th in the Canada Gazette and we are well beyond the minimum thirty day consultation period. With 1400 public submissions on record, it’s a safe bet that St.Onge has heard from all and sundry on what the final version of the Directive ought to say. The CRTC public hearings begin November 20th, so the final Policy Direction is likely to be issued before then.

In the Parliamentary session prior to the October 2021 election, before St.Onge was elected as a rookie MP from Brome-Missisquoi in a razor-thin win over the Bloc Québécois, she appeared before the Commons Heritage Committee. As the Chair of the Fédération nationale des communications et de la culture (FNCC-CSN), she was there to comment on then-Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault’s draft Policy Direction on Bill C-10, the first version of the Online Streaming Act that died on the order table when Justin Trudeau called a federal election in August 2021.

The yet-to-be-MP St.Onge represented journalists and media workers in Quebec. In fact her job was similar to my own at Unifor —mostly for English Canada—- and we appeared before the Heritage Committee on the same day, March 22, 2021.

Guilbeault’s draft Policy Direction (download below) had been circulated ten days earlier and St.Onge, myself and a long list of participants had gone over it in detail in case it offered clues to where the government might, or might not, go with amendments to the First Reading version of Bill C-10. 

We were on the same wavelength, as her opening comments revealed:

First, the appeal of deregulation and a race to the bottom to help integrate the digital giants is an illusion. In reality, our media and audiovisual ecosystem has been able to thrive because we’ve protected it from the hegemony of Hollywood and other wealthier and more powerful foreign competitors.

If we want to continue to stand out, not only for our Canadian productions but also for our social fabric, values and diversity, we must ensure that the modernization of our legislation will continue to protect our cultural sovereignty and enable our content to shine.

Nobody on the “Canadian content” side of the debate was very happy with Guilbeault’s first effort. The draft Directive was chock full of buzzwords such as “flexible,” “incentivize,” “dynamic marketplace,” and “streamlining.” It seemed like the Minister’s semaphore to the CRTC was signalling a light regulatory touch on Canadian content. St.Onge had the same criticism, and said so.

She also pointed out a raft of major issues in C-10 that were in fact addressed by amendments a month later. The issues concerned Canadian ownership, the exclusion of YouTube’s user generated content from regulations on the visibility of French language music, and the lack of emphasis on funding for original French language programming. With the exception of the Liberals’ change of heart on YouTube content, most of the amendments dealing with those issues came from Bloc MP Martin Champoux.

St.Onge also called out as “unacceptable” the Liberals’ gutting section 3(1)(f) of the Act. That section is the legal foundation for the 40-year definition of a Canadian “program” based on a headcount of Canadian producers, directors, writers, actors and other key roles. Amendments a month later from the NDP and the Bloc partly rehabilitated 3(1)(f) and they were confirmed when Bill C-11 was passed two years after that.

Now St.Onge-as-Minister has the opportunity to fine-tune her predecessor’s Policy Direction.

Pablo Rodriguez’s Policy Direction on C-11 is not identical to Guilbeault’s previous effort on C-10. For one, the resplendent use of deregulatory vocabulary is mostly gone. For two, Rodriguez signalled to the CRTC that the headcount approach to defining a Canadian program is still public policy and that broadcasters must continue to “maximize” the employment of Canadian creative leads. That appears to apply to both Canadian and Hollywood-made “Canadian” programs and would be a long way from where the Liberals started with their first draft of Bill C-10 in November 2020.

A hot potato that St.Onge-the-Minister might dare to grab is the issue of user generated programs. That could happen in a couple of different ways.

The first would be rethinking her predecessor’s surprisingly narrow ambit for regulating user uploaded videos and music. Rodriguez did the expected in asking the CRTC to exempt YouTuber videos from regulation, but he also limited regulation to the uploads posted by licensed broadcasters and streamers. In the gap between YouTuber videos and “rebroadcasting on YouTube,” copyrighted music remains unregulated. [Update: Heritage Canada has clarified that so long as a song has been previously distributed by any regulated streamer, it will be regulated if uploaded by any user to YouTube]. The French language music industry is extremely unhappy about this since Québécois music is disproportionately under promoted and under consumed on YouTube and other music streaming platforms.

We will see what the new Minister thinks about that.

The second issue she might grapple with is “online discoverability” of Canadian programs ——not just French language music—- on all streaming platforms, not just YouTube. 

In 2021, the yet-to-be-politician St.Onge made a point of telling MPs considering Bill C-10 that effective efforts at discoverability of Canadian programs meant taking on the sensitive issue of the streamers’ algorithm-driven recommendations of content:

It’s a big problem, because the bill does not include specific instructions for improving content discoverability… People often say that content will be discovered if it’s good. However, we know that things don’t work that way on the platforms, since content is displayed based on algorithms that are not transparent and over which we have no control. So, to improve content discoverability, the policy direction or the act itself would need to specify obligations on content discoverability and accountability, and currently there are none.

When the Liberals returned from the 2021 election to table Bill C-11, there was stronger language on discoverability because of the Bloc amendments to C-10. But C-11 also included a new provision that restrained the CRTC from ordering a “specific” change to a recommendation algorithm. The political fury that ensued over any regulation of algorithms was so intense that Minister Rodriguez went out of his way in his draft Policy Direction to ask the CRTC to prioritize discoverability “outcomes” over instructions and to “minimize” any possibility of ordering an underperforming streamer to tweak its algorithm.

Again, the very considerable lack of visibility and availability of French language music on YouTube and Spotify can probably only be addressed by algorithm changes.

The new Minister is on the spot.

***

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Hon. Andrew Scheer, MP

October 21, 2023

The Conservative Party is going to keep squeezing Bill C-11 for juice as long as it can. The latest is Andrew Scheer tabling in the Commons an MP’s request for information on the CRTC’s registry for the online undertakings (with annual revenues greater than $10 million) that the Commission is about to regulate. 

You can see where this is going. Scheer wants to know how much the registry will cost. I can tell him right now: it won’t cost as much as the federal long-gun registry that Stephen Harper scrapped.

Scheer is not a fan of Bill C-11. He made that clear in this Facebook video posted in 2022. While it’s tempting to conclude it’s satire, it’s not.

Update: In response to Scheer’s question the CRTC said that it expected between 50 and 100 online undertakings would register and this would require no additional operational spending by the Commission.

***

The 30-day period for public comment has closed on Heritage Minister Pascale St.-Onge’s draft regulation that brushes in some of the details of Bill C-18.

Google filed its response, rejecting the Minister’s document root and branch. Newsmedia Canada approved of one of the concessions made to Google (mischaracterized by Michael Geist as the publishers’ “surrender” on C-18). The Canadian Broadcasters Association asked for an amendment to the regulation to ensure that news websites belonging to radio companies don’t get left out in the cold as they were in Australia. 

I will be posting the forthcoming MediaPolicy.ca review of Google’s response as soon as it’s published by the Institute for Research on Public Policy.

***

Public trust in news reporting is always important and MediaPolicy.ca frequently relays survey results from the Oxford Reuters Digital News Report.

The Hamas terror attacks in southern Israel and the imminent counteroffensive into Gaza puts journalists in the unenviable position of reporting facts that the public may not want to hear, or want to hear them described in manner tailored to suit their own views.

MediaPolicy wrote about that here.

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October 19, 2023

The public broadcaster is in Pierre Poilievre’s cross-hairs again following the disclosure of CBC News Editor-in-Chief Brodie Fenlon’s staff e-mail reminding journalists of its long standing policy regarding the term “terrorism” as reporters cover the Hamas assault on Israel and the ensuing war.

Another reason to defund the CBC, said Poilievre; the woke public broadcaster is soft on terrorism. The Conservatives demanded that CBC executives appear before the Heritage Committee to answer for themselves.

Fenlon issued a statement that CBC’s editorial policy mirrors those of other news organizations such as the BBC, Reuters, Associated Press and AFP. Since then, the Washington Post and the Globe and Mail have expressed similar views.

The gist of those policies is that journalists using categorical vocabulary is perceived by many readers as endorsing or condemning news subjects, rather than reporting what is happening. There’s no ban on using the terms “terrorism” or “terrorist” but reporters (although not necessarily opinion columnists) are expected to let the news subjects do the talking, in other words quoting them.

It leads to some awkward writing, to say the least, to omit the adjective “terrorist” unless the rest of paragraph clearly depicts what occurred, i.e. the intentional killing or kidnapping of innocents for political ends. Unless “terrorist” actions aren’t newsworthy which they normally are.

Deciding whether to label Hamas a “terrorist organization” seems to be the lightning rod for controversy.

Hamas unequivocally used terrorist methods on October 7 by killing and kidnapping hundreds of innocents at a youth festival and several kibbutzes in southern Israel. Those would be infants and children; unarmed adults and seniors.

Hamas has sent suicide bombers to Israeli nightclubs. Hamas habitually uses terror tactics to get its way, so why the inhibition about the label?

The answer is that “terror” can be as loaded as it is descriptive for the reader. The loaded part, according to Emilie El Khoury, puts ordinary pro-Palestinian voices at an immediate disadvantage in public debate because they become associated with Hamas terrorism even if they don’t endorse Hamas, its violence or its objectives (which is to destroy the Israeli state). That’s a bit of a stretch, but it’s worth considering.

Personally I don’t care if news organizations call Hamas a terrorist organization. I think they are and I have deduced this from many news reports of their activities over the years.

But of course the terror-label is more than just a moral judgment on them and their activities: it’s newsworthy that other nation-states recognize or send military and civilian aid to Hamas, a de facto government that engages in terrorism.

What I do mind is news organizations falling back into euphemisms that sanitize what Hamas does or who they are. For example, the headline on the BBC explainer of its editorial policy refers to “Hamas militants.” I think we can agree, Hamas are not just militants. Better just to refer to Hamas as “Hamas.” You wouldn’t describe the 9/11 attack in New York as a “militant” attack.

But we should take seriously the BBC/CBC view that it is best for journalists to avoid judgmental or conclusionary vocabulary if possible, so as not to turn away readers who don’t like the judgment but need to learn what the facts really are. Canadian journalism academic Ivor Shapiro has a good piece on this.

To illustrate the point, consider the BBC News coverage of the tragedy of an explosion at Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza and the resulting mass casualties, initially reported as an Israeli air strike.

The BBC interviewed military experts and, in the resulting article, said that while the evidence of blame was inconclusive there exists the strong possibility the explosion was the result of a misfired rocket that did not originate in Israel.

In the middle of a war in the constant presence of misinformation, we may never know reliably who is to blame for the deaths. But the point is that if the BBC had been routinely labelling Hamas as a terrorist organization, its investigative journalism might well be dismissed by many on account of its policy.

And finally, some perspective in this moment: it matters far less what news reporting methods we agree upon and more that innocents are dying in Gaza and Israel and I know that is what we are all thinking about right now.

***

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CRTC 1987 Television regulation

October 8, 2023

The outrage over the CRTC’s regulation on registering online undertakings, including podcasts, reached firehose levels this week. It’s mostly a contrived recycling of the familiar policy arguments over regulating broadcasting delivered over the Internet, and from some commentators it’s about getting rid of any broadcasting regulation at all.

But in the interest of facts, here’s a primer for those with a limited amount of time.

The CRTC is going through a multi-step process to implement the Online Streaming Act, Bill C-11, that received Royal Assent last April.

One of its first steps is to take an inventory of online undertakings operating in Canada by requiring them to register the following basic information:

• name, head office address, and contact e-mail of the operator
• nationality of incorporation
• nature of the online service
• language of programming

That’s it. The new regulation does not require any information about programming or revenues since this is already covered by the CRTC’s annual digital media survey that applies to large video (greater than $50M in revenues) and audio ($25M) services.

The new registration requirement does not apply to the following:

• Any “social media creator,” meaning anyone uploading their content to YouTube or another sharing platform, regardless of how popular the program might be. This is excluded by Ministerial fiat to the CRTC in June.
• Video games (also excluded by Ministerial directive)
• Text-based content (because it’s not “broadcasting”)
• Any online platform with less than $10 million in annual broadcasting revenues. The CRTC is exempting from registration all “small” online undertakings of up to $10M.

So other than video games, all digital broadcasting operations above $10 million in annual revenue must register. On the audio side, that includes streaming platforms and stand-alone podcasters. No one has been able to point out a Canadian podcaster big enough to register on its own account. Most podcasters are either small independents (e.g. Canadaland) or their programs are hosted by the big streamers (e.g. Joe Rogan Experience on Spotify) or major Canadian broadcasters.

It’s fair to say that the Commission’s $10 million threshold for registration is a good indication which platforms will eventually be tasked through further regulations to produce and promote Canadian programs. It might be higher, not lower.

It’s also possible that the Commission will extend its 1987 television and radio codes of conduct limiting “abusive content” and “false or misleading news” to online undertakings. This is what has the free-speech absolutists upset and is worth a longer conversation in this space.

***

Anya Karadeglija of the National Post did some good freedom-of-information digging and came up with an internal Canadian Heritage memo revealing that the federal government may take a wait-and-see approach to the copyright issues raised by the explosive growth of ChatGPT and other AI large language models. Lawsuits in response to the new technology are in their early days.

The copyright issues include the rights of content creators whose material is being scraped, and monetized, by Big Tech platforms. They also raise the question of whether the AI platforms can claim their own copyright over the end-product, despite the fact that copyright is normally the property of a human being, not a machine, that created the work.

***

The Washington Post reports that Amazon’s AI-powered home-assistant Alexa had been telling listeners that the 2020 US election was stolen, citing a source from Rumble. Amazon says it has fixed the problem.

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There’s lots that could be said about this week’s news items on Bill C-18, the Online News Act. Google observed the expiry of the 30-day public consultation on the federal government’s draft regulation by reissuing its threat to follow Meta and ban Canadian news from its search engine. It’s worth a longer review in a future MediaPolicy post.

For the moment, I will just recommend an interesting and related read. Joshua Benton of Nieman Journalism Lab is probing the question of whether Google’s 90% market dominance of Search could be broken up by a federal court.

***

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October 4, 2023

Thanks to the richest man in the world, people around the globe have noticed Canada’s mass media legislation, updated for the age of Internet distribution by the Online Streaming Act. 

Elon Musk’s impulsive Twitter finger was at it again: “Trudeau is trying to crush free speech in Canada.” That was followed by a tweet promoting Musk’s go-to celebrity contributor on X, Tucker Carlson.

The actual news item was this: the CRTC issued a ruling that streaming platforms (whether they podcast or not) bringing in less than $10 million a year in Canadian revenue are exempt from registration requirements and that only streamers over $10 million need to submit basic identification like a contact person and what broadcast services are provided.

This registration and collection of information was discussed in detail during 54 days of legislative hearings for Bills C-10 and C-11, the most thoroughly debated Canadian legislation in recent memory. Podcasting was never ruled out (nor did the opposition Conservatives suggest it). So it’s not a surprise.

Students of media trivia will recall that in 2014 when CRTC Chair J.P.Blais asked the unregulated Netflix to provide subscriber numbers to the Commission, they defied him, relying upon the immunity of foreign-owned streamers from Canadian regulation. No more, thanks to C-11.

No matter. The usual Canadian suspects joined in with faux outrage at the prospect of the Internet age evolution of talk radio broadcasting, podcasting, was actually going to be regulated in some manner yet to be determined by the CRTC, as if there had ever been any doubt about that.

The allegation was even made that the CRTC had promised not to regulate podcasting: this is nonsense, the Commission website only re-stated what the Heritage Minister and the CRTC had told Canadians several times, that podcasters and all other “social media creators” uploading directly to hosting sites like YouTube would neither themselves nor their “programs” be regulated so long as they stick to sharing platforms.

Even Michael Geist (who defended Netflix’s defiance in 2014) won’t have to register. His owned, operated and self-curated website michaelgeist.ca, includes podcasts but no doubt falls just a nub under $10 million in revenue. Same for TheHub.ca, Canadaland, etc.

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Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge and US Senator Amy Klobuchar talk Facebook news throttles

October 1, 2023

By now you have figured it out, I can’t resist a public opinion poll on media policy.

One must be careful: the quality of sampling and the leading nature of some questions can be a problem. But here’s a good one from the Québec-based CROP published last week on the topic of the Facebook C-18 news throttle. The 1000 respondents skewed a little older (including a lot of retirees) but CROP helpfully broke down the results by age cohort.

Question 1: How frequently do you access your news from these different sources?

Results: (Daily or Multiple times weekly)

Google: 82%

Facebook: 69%

Other Social Media (e.g. TikTok): 51%

News websites: 57%

Instagram: 34%

Twitter: 18%

Not surprisingly, these numbers skew towards younger readers visiting Google, Facebook and TikTok; and older readers to news sites. Only 16% of the 18-34 year old cohort visit news websites daily.

The only shortcoming of the poll is that it didn’t dig down further and ask the extent to which these news sources were the respondent’s exclusive source of news, relevant to the debate over the news throttle. Still, question 2 (how important is Facebook to informing yourself about the news?) tested the intensity of respondents’ loyalty to competing news platforms. Sixty-six percent of the 18-34 cohort described Facebook as very important/important to their news consumption (only 26% of the 55+ age group said that). Forty-five per cent of the younger group reported the Facebook news throttle had disrupted their news consumption habits although only 31% said they had already adjusted by going to other sources (another 21% were considering it).

As for the punch line question, whether Facebook should be compensating news organizations for their content, the results were 48% in favour, 24% against, and the remaining 28% of no opinion. The results were heavily skewed by age group, with 63% of the 55+ crowd in agreement but only 31% of the younger (18-34) group.

The poll was taken solely in Québec, so it’s a good bet you would get different results elsewhere. Here’s a MediaPolicy post on previous polls.

And here’s the CROP poll download:

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The Facebook news throttle took Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge to Washington D.C. for a solidarity visit with Senator Amy Klobuchar. The Democratic Senator from Minnesota has been gamely advancing her version of the Online News Act Bill C-18 for two years now but her Bill is stalled. Facebook has also threatened US Congress and the state of California with repeats of their news throttles from Australia and Canada.

St-Onge captured that tersely with the sound byte picked up by Canadian Press: “They [Facebook] don’t want to be regulated, period.”

After doing a photo op with our Heritage Minister, Klobuchar joined her bill’s House co-sponsor Ken Buck (R-Col) for a 25-minute video interview with the Washington Post. MediaPolicy wrote that one up here, finding Buck’s right-wing trust-busting stance of interest.

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In yet another canary-in-the-coalmine moment for Canadian television, Global TV announced its was discontinuing its long running in-house  show Entertainment Tonight. The culprit: the steady downturn in television advertising revenue.

All television shows have a natural life cycle, but we can benchmark the overall trend by looking at CRTC data on ET’s competing channel E Talk! (CTV must report financials for that show because it holds a separate broadcasting licence, unlike Global’s ET where numbers are buried in Global’s network licences).

The bottom line: from 2017 to 2021, CTV’s E-Talk revenues dropped from $30 million to $23 million.

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There’s a good freelance piece by Alex Cyr in the Toronto Star that begins with a profile of Toronto-born Jeffrey Remedios who is now the head (and chief-talent spotter) of Universal Music Canada. The story then dives into the challenges facing the music streaming business model, in particular the impact of AI. Worth a read.

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