I am retired staff of Unifor, the union representing 300,000 Canadians in twenty different sectors of the economy, including 10,000 journalists and media workers. As the former Director of the Media Sector and as an unapologetic cultural nationalist, I have an abiding passion for public policy in Canadian media.
Yesterday MediaPolicy.ca published our regular weekend blog post. It covered the Broadcasting Participation Fund’s approaching funding crisis.
The BPF is a non-profit organization that funds public interest advocates whom appear before the CRTC on files that are especially important to Canadian audiences and subscribers (consumer advocates for issues arising out of broadband and wireless regulation are covered by a parallel scheme under the Telecommunications Act).
The BPF issued a press release last week highlighting what has been known for a few years: its dwindling financing is captive to a series of ad hoc contributions from big media companies like Bell as a condition of the Commission approving their mergers and acquisitions. Otherwise, the BPF has no predictable source of income.
What the press release didn’t say —-and MediaPolicy.ca overlooked—- was that Bill C-11 has a fix for that situation as follows:
11.1 (1) The Commission may make regulations respecting expenditures to be made by persons carrying on broadcasting undertakings for the purposes of…
(c) supporting participation by persons, groups of persons or organizations representing the public interest in proceedings before the Commission under this Act.
The government acted upon it in Bill C-11. Contrary to MediaPolicy.ca’s previous post, the recommendation did not fall on deaf ears.
The regulation contemplated in section 11.1 (1) (c) could result in a sustainable stream of income for the BPF, or any another public interest organization, financed by ‘broadcasting undertakings.’ Under C-11, those broadcasters include not only Bell and the other big Canadian media companies, but also Netflix, Disney, YouTube and other foreign online undertakings.
A companion recommendation made by the Yale Committee was for the CRTC to develop further transparency and reporting obligations for public interest groups receiving this broadcaster-originated funding.
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This week he chased after the Elon Musk parade that began when Twitter gratuitously relabeled the US National Public Radio’s account as ‘state-affiliated media,’ later scaled down to ‘government funded media.’ It ended with Musk tweeting ‘defund NPR.’
Our Leader of the Official Opposition asked Musk to slap the same ‘government funded’ warning on the currently unlabelled CBC because, in his words, “government funded media is defined as outlets where the government provides some or all of the outlet’s funding and may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content.”
As every school-kid knows, our federal government has no involvement over CBC editorial content, varying or otherwise, other than to appoint the CBC President (not the Editors-in-Chief though) every five years.
Never mind, that’s not the point. The point is that there’s a mission to be accomplished, as the National Post’s Tristin Hopper reviewed blow-by-blow this week.
Putting aside political theatre, there can be no doubt that Poilievre is deadly serious about ‘defunding’ the CBC and is not merely recycling years of Conservative threats.
The Liberal government is partly to blame, but maybe not in the way you think.
Audience and popular support for the CBC-TV in English Canada has been flagging over the years, to put in politely (radio services and French-language Radio-Canada TV are doing just fine).
The Liberals responded with a $150 million boost to the Corporation’s Parliamentary grant in their 2016 budget, growing the funding to $1.2 billion per year. They made an unfulfilledpromisein the 2021 election to boost funding again and wean the Corporation off its $400 million in advertising revenue.
But other than money, the Liberals have kept a barge-pole length away from the CBC’s governance, audience strategy and its eternal identity crisis as a public broadcaster.
That’s despite another election promise, restated in the Heritage Minister’s Mandate Letter, to “update CBC/Radio-Canada’s mandate to ensure that it is meeting the needs and expectation of today’s Canadian audiences, with a unique programming that distinguishes it from private broadcasters.”
Richard Stursberg says we’re overdue to think hard about the CBC and then act upon it. A former head of English-language CBC TV, Stursberg was a bottom-line advocate of eyeballs over palettes. He has some opinions worth reading in tworecent posts.
There is also a well put together news piece from Canadian Press discussing the legal barriers in the Broadcasting Act (even without C-11 amendments) facing a government wishing to selectively defund English language services.
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Fox News proprietor Rupert Murdoch had a bad week. His dump-you-by-email jilting of his fiancé went viral. [Correction: the e-mail jilting story refers to Murdoch’s split with his fourth wife last year. He broke off his engagement this week to his new fiancé.]
Then the judge overseeing the libel suit against Fox for trumpeting false claims of election fraud sanctioned his lawyers for withholding evidence of inculpatory tape recordings.
Finally a shareholder filed suit against him for exposing the publicly traded company to liability in the libel proceedings.
And how was your week?
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Rumour has it that the Senate will vote on the revised Online Streaming Act C-11 next week.
If the Bill is approved, the National Post has explained the ensuing sequence of events beginning with Royal Assent and followed by the Heritage Minister’s Policy Directive to the CRTC instructing the Commission to hold hearings and make rulings on a list of detailed regulatory issues.
Members of the public can request to participate in CRTC hearings although the Commission is typically choosy about accepting citizen-at-large requests. Instead, the Commission has a history of funding the appearances of public interest groups that offer expertise on broadcasting matters as advocates for the Canadian audience.
The expenses for those public interest group appearances have been dispensed by the non-profit, non-governmental Broadcasting Participation Fund (BPF). The BPF was created in 2012 and its financing enabled from the Commission ordering Canadian media companies to make one-off contributions to the BPF as one of its conditions of approving corporate mergers in the industry.
But BPF administrators announced this week that cash is running out. That scenario was predicted at least three years ago by the government’s blue-ribbon panel of advisors on the creation of Bill C-11. With no prospect of replenishment, the BPF is facing the possibility of running out of money before regulatory hearings are complete on Bill C-11, the Online News Act Bill C-18, or the Liberals’ anticipated Online Harms Bill.
That same blue-ribbon committee —the authors of the 2020 ‘Yale’ Report—-recommended that Bill C-11 direct the CRTC to set up a permanent and sustainably funded public participation fund. Section 11.1(1)(c) of Bill C-11 does just that. [Note: an earlier version of this post inaccurately stated that Bill C-11 rejected that recommendation. MediaPolicy.ca has published a correction, here.]
But here’s another issue: the BPF forked out $500,000 in grants over several years to Laith Marouf’s CMAC consultancy company. As Mark Goldberg has pointed out in his Telecom Trends blog, anyone conversant with Google Search could have discovered Marouf’s racist and anti-semitic tweets as part of a standard screening process. Neither BPF nor the federal government did so.
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There is a delightful set-up piece in the Globe and Mail for the Canadian Screen Awards that airs Sunday night April 16th at 8 p.m. on CBC TV and CBC Gem.
The list includes the Canadian leads from the Hollywood streamers’ newly established true north headquarters, reminding us of both the potential and pitfalls of Bill C-11 conferring responsibilities for CanCon movies on Amazon, Netflix and the rest of the Californian crowd.
The award show is not live: it’s a curated entertainment package of clips and presentations. The winners were announced this week, so spoiler alert if you click on that story.
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Here’s the recommended read of the weekend, although it’s not just a media issue: a New York Times story about the blow-up at the Stanford University Law School over campus speech.
It’s a familiar sounding story. A conservative jurist with controversial views is given a speaking platform. He is shut down by student heckling. The law school’s associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion tries to mediate and ends up getting suspended for her efforts. Et cetera.
It reminds me of my second year at the University of Toronto law school in 1985 when a conservative student group with invitation privileges gave a platform to the ambassador of the white supremacist state of South Africa. The University administration let the speaking engagement go ahead. It left everyone pretty raw and probably not better informed.
South African apartheid still met its ignominious end in 1991, no thanks to that student group.
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It’s become a MediaPolicy.ca habit to point out good CanCon-funded movies when they are released. In the last couple of months we’ve done well: Brother (94% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes), BlackBerry (96%) and Viking (100%).
I have actually seen ‘Viking’ thanks to Air Canada (first 45 minutes) and Crave (second 45 minutes) and loved it. Off beat, quirky hilarious, and made for about $3 million in my guesstimate. That’s about $30,000 ‘perfresh tomato’ which is a metric we ought to be using more often.
In the interest of balance let’s note the release of another certified Canadian movie, Simulant, a sci-fi thriller starring Toronto talents Simu Liu and Robbie Amell.
It just hit theatres. There aren’t enough reviews yet to earn a Rotten Tomatoes ranking, but it’s not looking good. Chris Knight of Original Cin gave it a B-minus and observed that it was a tad derivative of the 1982 Ridley Scott classic ‘Blade Runner.’ Then Barry Hertz of the Globe ripped it and, rubbing in the salt, described it as a ‘Canadian genre cinema’ film. That wasn’t intended as a compliment. He also noted some cheap production values.
You can’t win ‘em all. Just ask IMDB about their all-time Hollywood flop list. Those are different metrics, the kind that means you’ll never have another one:
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Over at Fox News Tucker Carlson was back at it, in character and ugly about trans Americans.
The Canadian advocacy group Egale published an Open Letter to the CRTC demanding Fox be booted off Canadian cable.
If a formal complaint is filed, the CRTC will have another ‘Russia Today’ situation on its hands. Although the censorship issue isn’t identical, it’s close enough.
Unlicensed programming services like Fox News and Russia Today are carried at the pleasure of the Canadian cable companies, rubber stamped by the CRTC.
At the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, our cable companies took the Russian propaganda service off the air on their own initiative. But Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez wanted to make a statement and publicly demanded the CRTC Commissioners —-whom he appoints— consider a formal ruling to confirm what the cable operators had already done.
You guessed it: the Commission complied in a ruling that was, in the view of MediaPolicy, thin on evidence. Also, since the CRTC television code’s rules on abusive comment and misinformation didn’t apply to unlicensed channels, the CRTC had to resort to a vague policy of ‘the public interest.’
A pleasing result but a bad process.
The Commission needs to develop a proper code for unlicensed channels and perhaps update the television code proscription against ‘misinformation’ for this post-Truth era we seem to be in. (A note: Bill C-11 does not extend the television code to social media uploads).
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Your recommended weekend read: Michael Coren’s reflections on fellow conservative apostate Charles Adler and what it’s like to change your mind.
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Yesterday ISED Minister François-Philippe Champagne made the least surprising federal announcement of 2023 by approving the Rogers-Shaw merger.
There is no fresh comment that this page could add to what has already been said by others or offered previously on MediaPolicy.ca regarding Rogers’ purchase of Shaw’s $21 billion in telco assets and $5 billion in broadcasting properties.
By coincidence, this week we wrote about the CRTC’s approval of start-up OneSoccer TV’s demand to be carried on the now-approved Rogers-Shaw cable platform, reaching 47% of the English Canadian cable market.
It was a victory for TV minnows. The merger played no small part in the Commission rethinking its 2015 policy on channel carriage that deferred to the cable providers.
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The House of Commons passed most but not all of the Senate amendments to Bill C-11 and sent the legislation back to the upper chamber. The Liberals imposed closure on debate with the support of the NDP but not the Bloc or Greens who support the legislation otherwise.
In the House, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre flashed a copy of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 as a cheeky (and unparliamentary) prop to make his point. He falsely claimed (in French) that the Bill censors what Canadians can say or hear online and that the censorship would be administered by ‘woke people in Ottawa.’
Since we all can take a joke, here’s to guessing what book titles the Liberals might display in the House next time Mr.Poilievre speaks.
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There is a story coming out of Silicon Valley that serves as a kind of epilogue to the imbroglio over the Canadian Heritage Committee’s document subpoenas to Google and Facebook.
Federal Court Judge James Donato ordered legal costs against Google —and retained the option of imposing default judgment against Google— for destroying evidence in four anti-trust suits brought by thirty-seven US state Attorney-Generals. The documents in question were internal chat records between Google employees which should have been retained in response to legal notices sent by the plaintiffs to preserve evidence.
Here at home, the Newsmedia Canada alliance of publishers is publicly pushing the Canadian Competition Bureau to investigate Google’s market power in digital advertising.
The order knocks out several of Fox’s legal defences including an argument that platforming false and unrebutted allegations of vote-rigging in the 2020 Presidential election was just ‘opinion’ protected under the US 1st amendment.
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Sometimes CRTC rulings on seemingly minor regulatory disputes raise big issues. The Commission’s ruling last week in favour of OneSoccer and against Rogers does that.
‘OneSoccer’ is a programming service owned by start-up Timeless Inc. It devotes itself to broadcasting Canadian soccer. It’s calling card is its exclusive rights to the eight-team Canadian Premier League as well as FIFA World Cup qualifying games for the two national teams (but not the quadrennial FIFA tournaments).
OneSoccer already offers its programming on its own online streaming site for $10 monthly. It’s trying to make the crucial breakthrough into the linear cable TV market. It took the first step by securing a cable deal with Telus before approaching Rogers in April 2021, a month after the Shaw-Rogers merger was announced.
Rogers said no thanks.
Miffed, OneSoccer filed a complaint to the CRTC under its ‘undue preference’ regulations that govern the opportunity of programming services to get on to cable and satellite platforms serving ten million Canadian households.
‘Undue preference’ in CRTC-speak means either a cable company favours its own channels —like Rogers favouring Sportsnet— or carries some third-party channels while denying carriage to similar services.
OneSoccer accused Rogers of trying to smother a potential competitor in the crib, pointing to Rogers’ Sportsnet and Sportsnet World channels, but also complained it was being treated unfairly because Rogers Cable carries soccer programming on Bell’s TSN, Ethnic Channels’ beIN Sports and TLN’s EuroWorldSports.
Also OneSoccer wasn’t shy about wrapping itself in the Canadian flag: “Rogers appears not to be concerned that its viewers can watch extensive coverage of German and English soccer, but not Canadian soccer.”
You can follow the back-and-forth volley of arguments between OneSoccer and Rogers here…
Rogers had a pretty good defense if it weren’t for the merger and the remarkable success of our National Soccer Teams.
That strong position, on paper anyway, stems from the Commission’s ruling in 2015 to roll back existing rights of independent programming services to ‘mandatory access’ to cable platforms. The Commission put the cable companies in the driver’s seat determining which channels are popular enough to earn carriage on a distribution platform that at least in theory is not infinite.
The Commission remained the watchdog by enforcing the undue preference regulations as well as its ‘1:1’ rule that cable companies must carry one third-party channel for each of their own.
To punctuate the new gatekeeper policy, in 2016 and 2017 the Commission blessed Bell and Vidéotron kicking the declining Avis de Researche and BBC Kids channels off of their linear platforms.
The 2015 policy wasn’t OneSoccer’s only problem. As much as Canadian soccer is growing in popularity, OneSoccer struggled to give the Commission convincing viewing data of enough games with enough audience to make the leap from a streaming website to a viable television channel.
Under the 2015 policy, you would expect a Rogers win.
Well that was then, this is now.
Having approved the merger of Rogers and Shaw cable and satellite properties in March 2022, the Commission was sensitive to the fact that if ISED Minister François-Philippe Champagne approves the overall deal it will put Rogers in command of 47% of the English Canadian cable TV market. The Commission’s approval of the merger makes it that much harder to live up to its 2008 ‘Diversity of Voices’ policy which links better programming to more competition.
That is why the Independent Broadcast Group pleaded with the Commission to reject the merger because they were sure their members —-the minnows of the industry— will get screwed or just shut out from a must-have platform and that diverse programming will suffer as a result.
In short the OneSoccer complaint was a litmus test of whether the minnows have a chance.
As you read the Commission ruling you can see them straining to tick off the legal boxes to rule in OneSoccer’s favour. That required the Commission not only to favourably compare the popularity of Canadian domestic soccer leagues with European first division football, but to ignore the lack of audience data.
It also required the Commission to ignore the glaring question of why OneSoccer couldn’t prove Rogers’ undue preference by first demonstrating its own viability through carriage deals with Bell, Vidéotron, Eastlink and Cogeco?
In the end the Commission stated plainly that if ‘given the opportunity’ OneSoccer ‘might’ prove viable on cable. It ordered Rogers to put OneSoccer on the cable dial.
The Commission then went on to address the elephant in the room, Canadian content:
As noted above, Timeless stated that 90% of OneSoccer’s programming is Canadian. Further, it is likely that OneSoccer is the only service that broadcasts only Canadian soccer and soccer-related content. Therefore, Rogers’ distribution of OneSoccer on linear television would benefit the Canadian broadcasting system by enhancing the availability of Canadian content on television, an objective defined in the Act.
That statement earns a hearty endorsement from MediaPolicy.ca but with the observation that there is no specific regulatory policy directing an outcome like ‘carry more national sports.’
The desirability of platforming any particular Canadian contentwas supposed to be left to the corporate gatekeepers designated under the 2015 policy. The Commission is not supposed to pick winners, save for the undue preference check.
Also keep in mind, another channel with Canadian content that is currently on Rogers Cable may get kicked off the island as a result: Rogers is only obliged by the Commission to carry 45 independent programming services.
The epilogue to this story is that it is not over: OneSoccer must still negotiate retail price and ‘theme’ packaging with Rogers. Should be fun.
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This weekend’s recommended read is New York Times columnist Tom Friedman’s view that this tool and/or weapon heralds the modern world’s arrival at a ‘Promethian’ moment of hope and dread.
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Meetings like this week’s Ottawa visit by US President Joe Biden to discuss Canadian-American relations with the Prime Minister usually include the hot trade issues of the day.
As the New York Times observed beforehand, the two leaders ‘are likely to go through the ritual…of griping about some perceived trade injustice by each other’s country.’
Certainly Justin Trudeau wanted to talk about Biden’s ‘Buy America’ program for government-funded domestic projects.
Internet activist Michael Geist predicted a high noon moment between the two leaders that would feature American disgruntlement with ‘serious trade tension’ he suggests exists because of Canada’s various Internet-related initiatives including Bills C-11 and C-18. Geist wasn’t alone in anticipation, several press reports speculated a discussion of that legislation was imminent.
The visit came and went without trade griping and posturing on Internet legislation or any other trade issues, judging from the leaders’ joint statement which was preoccupied with far more existential matters.
There is one thing of which we should remind ourselves when the US President (or the Canadian Prime Minister) give voice to trade concerns: a trade ‘concern’ is not necessarily any indication of a plausible violation of our trade treaties, the global GATT regime and trilateral CUSMA deal.
In the case of the Canadian legislation for Online News (C-18) and Online Streaming (C-11), Biden’s US Trade Representative and his Ambassador to Ottawa have both dutifully advocated for blue-state Californian interests in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles, much in the way the parents of the schoolyard bully like get in the teacher’s face.
An American complaint on C-18 would be particularly without merit, as the University of Calgary’s Hugh Stephens has patiently outlined here and here.
It’s disappointing when Canadians uncritically endorse American trade pressure because they don’t like C-18, a piece of legislation supported by three out of four Canadian political parties and endorsed in principle (in the 2021 election) by the fourth.
This happens every time there is a cross-border disagreement about Canada’s cultural legislation. On that point, MediaPolicy took a little trip down memory lane here and here.
Suffice it to say, there are so many other legitimate policy arguments to be made about C-18 without Canadians giving encouragement to US commercial interests making bogus trade claims.
Last word on this for now: it ought to be noted in the case of C-18 that American interests don’t even speak with one voice, as the US NewsMedia Alliance supports C-18 and an American version of it which is stalled in Congress.
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It’s not that American politicians are averse to putting the screws to Big Tech if not headquartered in their own country.
This week Congress gave a proper Washington hazing to TikTok CEO Chew Shou Zi over the security of personal data with the threat of banning the Chinese-owned social media application from US soil.
Banning an app in America. Ponder that a bit.
The Washington Post report of the Congressional hearing is helpful: the bottom line is legislators were not buying TikTok’s privacy solution which is to re-shore its American data and keep it on an American company’s servers in Texas.
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To be fair to US legislators, our Parliamentarians do a little Big Tech hazing from time to time.
We mentioned last week that the Liberals on the Heritage Committee got carried away by demanding Meta produce evidence of its corporate communications with private Canadian citizens about Bill C-18.
This past Monday the Liberals wisely backed down and reworded the offending the summons based on Conservative MP Rachael Thomas’ suggestion (who then abstained on the vote). Here’s the Globe and Mail report on that.
Critics were quick to point out that the same inappropriate demand for citizen communications remained in a previous summons issued to Google. But the inconsistency was ignored in Committee, perhaps because MPs from all parties hadn’t been paying close enough attention when unanimously approving the earlier wording of the Google summons.
Perhaps Google will ignore that aspect of the Committee’s request and MPs will look the other way.
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Here’s our plug for Mark Goldberg’s blog Telecom Trends that posted a seriesthis week about Internet and wireless pricing.
Monthly broadband and cell phone bills might be the most politicized consumer policy issue going and this industry expert offers a helpful rigour about the facts that laypersons will appreciate.
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This week MediaPolicy wrote about a media disruptor coming straight at us at pace: Open AI’s version of an instant-Wikipedia tool called ‘ChatGPT.’ You can activate it by signing up on Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
We tested ChatGPT’s capabilities by asking it if the Online Streaming Act was a good piece of legislation. Then we asked the same thing about the Online News Act.
You may end up agreeing with our observation that ChatGPT’s promise and danger are tied to the quality of the news and information sources that it synthesizes.
That points up the importance of media monitoring organizations like NewsGuard whose ratings of reliable journalism could be vital to the programming of Bing’s ChatGPT and whatever Google Search comes up with. Media commentator Ben Smith discusses that here.
Of course the disinformation empire might strike back. The MAGA-booster US Congressman Matt Gaetz wants NewsGuard “investigated” for being too hard on MAGA-friendly news outlets.
Sarah Polley won an Oscar for ‘Women Talking’ and Daniel Roher won for his documentary feature on Russian democrat and political prisoner ‘Navalny.’
On the CanCon side of the moon, Barry Hertz gives a rave review to the new release “Brother” set in Toronto’s east end. Check out the trailer, here.
Another CanCon release on its way is the documentary “299 Queen Street West,” the success story of ‘80s upstart MuchMusic.
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Journalists and media nerds can’t have missed the Gary Lineker/ BBC/ Conservative Party flap in the UK.
The former football star and top broadcaster Lineker was suspended by BBC management for reproaching the Conservative government on Twitter for its harsh policy on migrants. His fellow BBC sports commentators downed tools, BBC management relented, and the cozy connections between the BBC Chairman and the Conservative Party dominated coverage of the entire affair.
In the aftermath Press Gazette published an inventory of news outlet guidelines for social media activity of its journalists.
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Last week’s escalation of the battle over the Online News Act Bill C-18 by Meta —making its strongest threat yet to ban news from Facebook— was certain to get a strong response from the Liberal government.
The Liberals are reconvening the Commons Heritage Committee seeking all-party support for five days of investigation into Meta and Google market power internationally and their attempts, through threats or public campaigns, to bully legislators into backing off from regulatory efforts like C-18. The Globe and Mail story is here.
The motion includes summoning senior executives from both Google and Meta with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as the headline attraction.
Zuckerberg won’t show up of course (he defied similar summonses issued by both Canadian and British Parliaments in the wake of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal.)
The motion includes a subpoena of both Google and Meta’s internal communications about throttling Canadians’ access to news, a repeat of the Committee’s previous summons snubbed by Google.
It goes on to demand the platforms’ documentation of each company’s communications with possible proxy campaigners against C-18 and any Canadian who has communicated with them about regulation. That move from the investigatory to the inquisitorial is already attracting attention and the Liberals might not get support for that from the other parties.
It’s all political theatre since the die is cast on C-18: the Bill has long passed the House and is being prepared for consideration by the Senate Transportation and Communications Committee.
Nevertheless the threats by Meta (and Google) are reigniting the policy debate on how government ought to respond to Big Tech’s role in beggaring the Canadian news industry.
This brings us to our recommended weekend read penned by Konrad von Finckenstein and Peter Menzies.
Finckenstein and Menzies have never bought into the central policy argument underpinning Canada’s Bill C-18 and the Australian Newsmedia Bargaining Code, that Google and Facebook’s market power over news distribution results in news outlets being under compensated (or uncompensated) for their news content made available on those platforms.
But Finckenstein and Menzies do make a policy link to the platforms’ other oligopoly, their market power in digital advertising that has swept away market share from newspapers and broadcasters.
That leads them to propose abandoning C-18 and instead negotiating a news fund with Google:
Instead of forcing [Google and Facebook] into a forced and obviously loveless marriage based on a debatable economic foundation, a simpler immediate solution is available. Google has publicly said that it is willing to pay into a fund to support journalism producers.
Why not take them up on it?
Digital platforms over a certain size (say $75 million) would have to pay a given percentage (say five percent for the sake of argument) of their gross advertising revenue into a fund administered by a board set up by key journalistic bodies in Canada representing all sectors whose primary business is news.
The proceeds—in a manner somewhat similar to the Canada Media Fund but unburdened by its subjectivity and language politics—would be paid on a per (journalist) capita basis to each organization. The government would have nothing to do with it.
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OpenAI just released its latest version of ChatGPT and the imagination runs wild. ChatGPT-4 transcribes video into text.
The first thing that jumps to MediaPolicy’s Luddite mind is that ChatGPT-4 will put the folks creating Described Video out of work.
A similar concern about automation has already struck both the makers and consumers of journalism, just as educators at universities and high schools wrestle with their torment.
There is a well-known aphorism about innovation: we tend to overestimate its impact in the short-run and underestimate it in the long-run.
Less than six months after OpenAI’s release of its prototype, these are early days. Perhaps you have already taken ChatGPT out for a test drive.
MediaPolicy.ca has done the same, starting with a couple of familiar topics, the federal Bills C-11 (Online Streaming Act) and C-18 (Online News Act).
Posed to ChatGPT through the Microsoft Bing search app:
Q. Is Bill C-11 the Online Streaming Act a good law?
The Online Streaming Act is a bill that aims to regulate how streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney+ and Spotify must treat all the audio-visual content posted online³. It would require them to contribute to the creation and promotion of Canadian content¹²⁴. The bill passed its third reading in the Senate last month with 26 amendments¹².
Whether it is a good law or not depends on your perspective and values. Some people may think it is a good law because it supports Canadian culture and diversity, creates more opportunities for Canadian creators, and ensures fair competition with traditional broadcasters⁴. Others may think it is a bad law because it interferes with consumer choice, imposes unnecessary costs on streaming platforms, and violates freedom of expression⁵.
Source: Conversation with Bing, 2023-03-14
(1) Bill C-11 – everything you need to know about Canada’s new Online …. https://http://www.techradar.com/features/bill-c-11-everything-you-need-to-know-about-canadas-new-online-streaming-act Accessed 2023-03-14.
(2) A new streaming bill is close to becoming law in Canada. Here’s how it …. https://http://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/bill-c-11-explained-1.6759878 Accessed 2023-03-14.
(3) A new streaming bill is close to becoming law in Canada. Here’s how it …. https://http://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/bill-c-11-explained-1.6759878 Accessed 2023-03-14.
(5) Online Streaming Act back in House, minister intends to reject some …. https://http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/online-streaming-bill-final-debate-in-house-of-commons-1.6772177 Accessed 2023-03-14.
I tried a different question in hopes of a more in-depth answer.
I tried something more direct —“write me a detailed summary of Bill C-11” — and ChatGPT generated an almost identical and terse reply to the previous question about how the legislation would regulate media.
But this time Microsoft supplemented the answer with several tiles of news stories (quaere do the news outlets have a commercial arrangement with Microsoft for making these available on Bing?)
On to test number two. MediaPolicy asked Bing/ChatGPT if “Bill C-18 the Online News Act is a good law.”
I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.
The footnoted sources with this last reply were skewed towards the Bill’s critics (Michael Geist, Sue Gardner), but not one-sided: they included a debunker on the trade issue from Hugh Stephens and a good explainer of the legislation from the Globe and Mail.
In this C-18 reply, ChatGPT’s shortcomings were of omission: the answer actually misleads the reader into thinking the Bill is about lost advertising revenue (that’s certainly relevant to the politics) and fails to inform the reader of the stated intent of the Bill: requiring Tech platforms with monopolistic market power over news distribution to pay compensation for ‘making available’ editorial content without a license.
Following our tests, here are some provisional conclusions about the state of ChatGPT and journalism:
(1) It will get better as a research tool, especially in its use of links to further research. In that way, it threatens to put Wikipedia out of business (unless that’s a classic short-term overestimation).
(2) So far the sources are confined to legitimate news outlets and academic opinion blogs (overlooking the MediaPolicy firehose, reader be outraged).
(3) As a journalistic tool to explain the world, early ChatGPT is very much an unreflective minute-taker, an automated imitator of ‘both sides’ journalism.
(4) It is a great commercial opportunity for somebody, presumably Microsoft with Google soon to follow.
(5) If Microsoft Bing was a “designated news intermediary” under Bill C-18, its explicit use of news tiles in its ChatGPT replies would certainly be “making news content available” as contemplated by the Act. As for Bing’s prose replies to reader interrogations, a question arises: if a new version of ChatGPT stripped out the news links and just scraped news content from multiple journalist sources, would Microsoft escape the applicability of C-18?
For more, have a read of The Logic CEO David Skok’s comments on this topic.
Here’s an enthusiastic product review of ChatGPT-4 from PC Magazine.
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Yesterday morning MediaPolicy posted here to bring you up to date on the reaction to Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez’s rejection of the key Senate amendment to Bill C-11 limiting regulation of social media posts.
The same post updates you on CRTC Chair Vicky Eatrides’ dramatic re-boot of wholesale ISP regulation.
Yesterday afternoon Google Canada representatives appeared under summons at the Commons Heritage Committee to explain themselves on account of Google’s six-week throttling of Search results for Canadian news articles. The test, which ends March 16th, affects 1.2 million Canadians including pro rata thirteen Members of Parliament.
But today the focus shifts to Meta which told the Globe and Mail last night, in a renewed threat, that it will permanently block news posts on Canadian Facebook accounts should Bill C-18 pass the Senate. It was unclear from the Meta statement —-expressed in its most categorical terms yet—if the blocking of news would include breaching its existing commercial agreements with numerous publishers and deleting the pages of hundreds of Canadian news outlets.
Both companies used similar tactics in Australia two years ago before legislation was enacted requiring compulsory licensing payments for news posts. The legislation requires news outlets to prove that the platforms’ monetization of their news content exceeds the value of free distribution.
C-18 is modelled on the Australian law.
Meanwhile, the Heritage Committee’s hazing of Google representatives was a debacle.
Not surprisingly, Google’s American chief executives refused to obey the summons that has no extraterritorial effect (although they visited Ottawa previously to lobby against C-18).
Instead Google sent Canadian Vice President Sabrina Geremia to bob, weave and prevaricate in her answers to questions about the news throttle and whether it was done to influence votes in the Senate.
It also became clear that Google was defying the summons to provide the Committee with internal e-mails and texts related to the throttle.
Mid-way through the proceeding, MPs unanimously voted to require Geremia and her policy colleague Jason Kee to swear witness oaths in hopes of getting less mendacious answers. It didn’t change much.
This caused MPs to tee off in some memorable moments: here is Conservative MP Kevin Waugh doing his disappointed grandpa thing and Liberal MP Chris Bittle channeling Johnnie Cochran:
Several MPs pointed out that Google’s failure to notify the unsuspecting 1.2 million Canadians of the news throttle meant they were unaware of breaking news, potentially safety related.
Google’s Geremia did her best to state what the web giant wants.
It wants C-18 dead.
Instead, it would like the cost certainty of contributing a negotiated lump sum to a Canadian News Fund. To that end, Kee pointed to a deal that Google signed with Taiwan earlier this week.
The serendipitous agreement is notable for its cost certainty but also its price: $3 million USD annually for three years. That compares to the voluntary compensation agreements signed by Google in Australia —with a population similar to Taiwan—- reputedly worth around $100 million USD per year.
Geremia and Kee provided an inventory of objections to C-18.
Their main objection was to ‘payment for links.’ That’s a reference to a key provision in C-18 (and the Australian legislation) that scopes in news content ‘made available’ in Search results as opposed to the full alphanumeric text posted on the Results page (its also unclear how video news could be captured other than through ‘links’).
The debate over the trope ‘payment for links’ can be saved for another MediaPolicy post.
But what Google representatives claimed yesterday was that ‘made available’ means C-18 requires platforms to reward news outlets for each link posted, incentivizing media outlets to flood the Internet with a high volume of ‘click bait’ and low quality journalism.
Concerned about unlimited liability for each link to worthless news content, Geremia implied C-18 metes out compensation to news outlets at a fixed ‘per link’ price.
The Bill does no such thing.
First, it allows Google and Meta a crack at negotiating a lump sum for all news content provided by news outlets either as a group or individually (as they did in Australia). Practically that means Google can negotiate a series of News Funds.
If that negotiating opportunity doesn’t work out, an arbitrator will decide what a news outlet’s body of platform-linked journalism is worth (minus the free distribution) and there is no inkling of a ‘per link’ tariff in this key provision of C-18:
Factors
38 An arbitration panel must take the following factors into account in making its decision:
(a) the value added, monetary and otherwise, to the news content in question by each party, as assessed in terms of their investments, expenditures and other actions in relation to that content; and
(b) the benefits, monetary and otherwise, that each party receives from the content being made available by the digital news intermediary in question.
Another Google allegation is that House amendments to C-18 force the platforms to compensate certain news outlets even if they don’t produce news.
Again, this is false.
Likely the Google claim is a reference to amendments that pre-qualify campus and community news organizations as legitimate news outlets, as well as Indigenous news outlets, similar to the Bill’s pre-qualification of the many news outlets that have met the test of a legitimate news outlet under the government’s ‘QCJO’ aid to journalism program.
Those amendments do not however relieve those news organizations of being able to point to a body of news content that is of net benefit to the platforms under section 38, quoted above.
We could go on but that’s enough on C-18 for a Saturday morning.
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This week was so packed full of media news that the National Post’s beat reporter posted a tweet in which she good naturedly begged newsmakers to take a break, having written three stories in 20 hours.
One can already hear community news journalists reacting ‘three stories, that’s a morning’s work for us.’
But point taken and the week isn’t over: this afternoon at 1 p.m. Heritage Committee MPs will have a go at Google executives for throttling Canadian news in an oafish attempt to intimidate Canadian Parliament.
The update on the Liberals’ Online Streaming Act C-11 is that Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez has accepted most of the Senate’s amendments but not the most contentious.
The big change to C-11 the Senate wanted was to confine the regulation of uploaded videos and music streaming on YouTube, Spotify and TikTok to the commercial products of conventional broadcasters and music labels, forever ousting the CRTC from dealing with content uploaded by independent YouTube and TikTok artists but also any kind of ‘digital first’ content in the distant future.
That’s been rejected by the government. The MediaPolicy view is that the CRTC should retain the authority to regulate but exempt YouTuber and TikTok activity for now and review it all in a few years if the trends in content distribution change.
The Bill has gone back to the House, which must vote on the Minister’s yes’s and no’s to the Senate amendments.
The reaction of the two Independent Senators (Paula Simons and Julie Miville-Dechêne) who crafted the ‘YouTuber’ amendment, winning a majority of Senate support, was of course disappointment.
The Toronto Starspoke to Simons, the former Edmonton Journal columnist:
“I certainly fought for this amendment, in a way frankly, that I never have before as a senator,” Simons said, sharing how, behind the scenes, she and her Senate colleague had phoned, emailed and “buttonholed” a series of cabinet ministers to get them on board.
“We’re still trying to figure out what we do next, because I don’t think either of us is really prepared to just shrug and say, ‘Oh, well, we did our best.’”
The former Radio-Canada journalist Miville-Dechêne struck a less combative tone about a Senate push-back in an interview with La Presse Canadienne:
La sénatrice ne s’avance pas sur la possibilité qu’on assiste à un «ping-pong» législatif entre la Chambre des communes et le Sénat qui retarderait l’adoption du projet de loi.
«Il y a 80% des sénateurs en ce moment qui sont des indépendants, donc on va devoir voir. Je pense que tout le monde va réfléchir à ça, lire les amendements, réfléchir à ce qu’ils vont faire, mais je n’oserais pas prédire ce qui va se passer», dit Mme Miville-Dechêne.
The Minister’s revisions are destined to pass the House as neither the NDP nor the Bloc appear to have wavered in their support.
On the floor of the House the debating points haven’t changed much after two years and countless days of committee hearings. However Conservative MP Rachael Thomas had an amusing new talking point, that C-11 is being driven forward by not only traditional broadcasters but by “the big union bosses.”
It seems common ground that Senators would not be flouting Parliamentary convention if they voted down at least once a House version of C-11 missing their key amendment.
That bicameral ping-pong would be likely if it was only up to Senators on the Transportation and Communications Committee, but it’s anyone’s guess if the full plenary of Senators are similarly invested in their amendments given the clear will of the House.
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Meanwhile in the world of paying the household bills, CRTC chair Vicky Eatrides didn’t take long to respond to the February 13th Policy Directive from Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne on wholesale ISP regulation.
The new chair announced a CRTC proceeding that she expects to result in lower wholesale prices offered by telcos to independent ISPs like TekSavvy.
Confident that a ‘just and reasonable’ wholesale price should be lower than the rates set by the Commission in 2021, Eatrides jump started a months-long legal process by ordering an immediate ten per cent cut to the portion of the wholesale rate calibrated to the Independents’ daily traffic on the telco networks.
That’s possibly a five per cent cost savings for the Independents that potentially could get passed along to consumers. A TekSavvy spokesperson dismissed the rate reduction as insignificant.
Eatrides also suggested the Commission was warm to an interim order granting the Independents access to Bell and Telus’ ‘last mile’ fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) networks which are key to Independents being able to offer customers download speeds greater than 50 mbps.
Only last week MediaPolicy opined that Eatrides was going to have produce some regulatory magic to ‘do something’ in response to the Minister’s clear demands for lower prices and more widely available high-speed downloading.
Eatrides managed this by pushing out a written decision on an outstanding (since the fall of 2021) CRTC proceeding on network configuration, declaring the Commission’s 15-year-old plan to transition Independents to a superior business model of ‘disaggregated’ network access to be dead as a door nail, a failed experiment that could never have worked.
This allows her to clear the legal decks for revisiting lower rates on the current ‘aggregated’ network and FTTH.
There’s more: the new chair also mused aloud that retail price regulation was back on the table if prices don’t come down, a regulatory verboten for a generation.
An excellent summary of Eatrides’ announcement can be found in Cartt magazine here.
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