online safety – MediaPolicy.ca

The Trump carpetbaggers pillaging Canada

Satiric AI illustration based on Thomas Nast’s Harpers Weekly illustration, 1872

September 2, 2026

The epithet “Carpetbaggers” has an evocative history in the United States.

It was how post-Civil War white southerners described opportunistic northern merchants who descended upon the war-devastated former slave states.

The same vitriolic insult was conferred upon the corps of northern abolitionists and office-seekers who arrived to mobilize the Black vote for newly created state legislatures, the entire chapter in American history known since as the Reconstruction era.

After Reconstruction ended in the 1876 sell-out of Black civil rights and the wage re-enslavement of African Americans, the term Carpetbaggers became more generic. Wikipedia describes it as “denot[ing] people who move into a new area for purely economic or political reasons despite having no ties to that place.”

Lately the California-headquartered streamers operating in Canada have earned the Carpetbagger sobriquet.

The streamers don’t own our broadcasting market, not yet. Canadian owned television and radio broadcasting is slowly diminishing but it remains significant. Our cable and satellite-borne audio visual signals reach 9 million out of 15 million Canadian households.

But Netflix reportedly reaches about 9.8 million Canadian subscribers. With the grey market in password sharing, that is probably well over 10 million households. The other US streamers Amazon Prime (7.5m), Disney (6m) and Paramount (5.3m) are all ahead of the HBO-boosted Bell Crave (5m). According to the CRTC, three out of four Canadians reported subscribing to an audio-visual streaming service, compared to a little over half of Canadian households (58%) subscribing to a traditional television service.

That dominant American share of our streaming market means that Canadian subscriber dollars, advertising revenues, and reinvestment capacity generated by Canadian profits all flow south.

As a caveat to that generalization, there is a debate (impoverished by the lack of data) over how much money Netflix and the streamers voluntarily invest in English language Canadian content as equity partners. Canadians are also familiar with the occasional appearance of Canadian themed Netflix originals such as the upcoming Below or Amazon’s The Sticky.

But the yawning gap between how much Canadian broadcasters are required by the CRTC to invest in Canadian content —-30% of their revenue—- and the goose egg obligations for streamers can only be described as Carpetbagging.

The federal government has taken a couple of stabs at remedying that extraction of value.

One attempt was the ill-fated $1 billion per year Digital Services Tax on the streamers (but also other digital businesses like Uber).

When this kind of tax was developed a decade ago in Europe, it was a counterweight to American Big Tech’s avoidance of local corporate taxes by parking their profits in tax havens. By the time Canada got around to legislating our own DST, the federal Liberals never clarified whether it was plugging the corporate tax hole or simply reshoring a share of the streamers’ revenue extraction from Canada.

As you know, Prime Minister Carney gave the DST away in June 2025 when President Trump demanded it. I am sure Carney now regrets that as a bad bet on the President’s intentions.

The second attempt to remedy the California streamers’ value extraction was the Online Streaming Act.

You know the story here. The latest chapter is that in 2024 the CRTC imposed a five per cent cash levy on the US streamers, the same that Canadian cable companies pay. Those levies feed the Canada Media Fund and a number of similar production funds that finance Canadian content shows. Those shows are made by independent Canadian producers who license them back to Canadian broadcasters and (once the three-year old Online Streaming Act is actually applied) to US streamers. The key point is that the shows are licensed at a lower price because of the media fund money that gets invested up front.

Not good enough for the Carpetbaggers. Even after Mark Carney overruled the CRTC and rid them of the levies, they weren’t satisfied. That was confirmed when the streamers were able to get the White House to push for the evisceration of another Online Streaming Act tool, the surfacing of Canadian content on US streaming platforms, on the very last day of trade talks.

The reason that the streamers deserve the unsavoury Carpetbagger label is because they have worked so hard to earn it.

Before Donald Trump began his second term in 2025, a more compliant Netflix told the CRTC they could live with a two per cent cash levy (provided none of it went to news). Canadian cable companies pay double that, at 4 per cent.

Ah, but that was then and this is now. At the moment, the Netflix position in Canada is no regulation, no obligations. Full value extraction from Canadian subscribers and advertisers.

And to make this happen, the streamers have been able to insinuate their influence into the ground zero of trade talks.

Writing about this back in 2024 in Cartt.ca, I noted the Netflix “strategy appears to be oppose, appeal, and get the attention of the next U.S. president, U.S. Congress and U.S. trade representative.”

And here we are.

***

One of the trade files that went quiet for the last few months was Donald Trump’s threats beginning in 2025 to put a tariff on US movies shot in Canada, destined for the American, Canadian and global markets.

That’s not what the streamers and big studios wanted from him. They like shooting some of their shows abroad in the UK, Canada, and Europe, all of which have world-class production clusters and a Rolidex of trusted production partners. The analogy of the integrated US-Canada automotive market applies here.

The industry backdrop to this is that, post-pandemic, Los Angeles has endured a substantial drop off in its market share of American film and TV production, losing work to other US states and other countries. The end of the “streaming wars” and its profligate spending is also a factor. Some states, like California, have aggressively stepped into the subsidy space in order to reclaim work. But US Congress has not.

It looks like months of federal lobbying has paid off for the streamers because this week President Trump came out in favour of a federal film production tax credit. While California and other US states have increased their own subsidies, the US does not have a federal counterpart. In Canada, we combine federal and provincial production subsidies made available to both Canadian and foreign studios making shows here.

Canada has been smart about building a world class audio-visual production industry. It is in fact our domestic industry’s financial ballast.

To the extent that a US federal subsidy succeeds in American studios reshoring production, that will impact us.

***

MediaPolicy has been following the big Meta settlement with 48 US states (Florida is not settling) on the product liability lawsuit against Instagram and Facebook.

There is a good post-game analysis in the New York Times.

Meta’s lawyer is C.J. Mahoney. He was the US Deputy Trade Representative during the 2018 CUSMA talks (isn’t that an interesting connection between Big Tech and the Trump White House!).

The Times story reports that Mahoney stick handled his client’s settlement with the states after individual plaintiffs won the precedent setting jury trials in California and New Mexico resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars of damages awarded against Meta.

Those trials and related litigation proved that Meta can not successfully hide behind the “free speech” shield in the famous section 230 of the Clinton-era Communications Decency Act.

From there, it was all downhill sledding for the state Attorneys General.

And importantly for Canada, despite binding ourselves to Big Tech’s section 230 defence in the 2018 CUSMA digital chapter (clause 19.17.2), the reversal of Meta’s fortunes means that the federal Safe Social Media Act Bill C-34 is in principle not a violation of that agreement, vindicated by rulings in the American courts.

Another backbone moment in this story was demonstrated by the state Attorneys General who rebuffed Mahoney’s offer to settle for damages only. They held out for the product safety changes to protect children logging on to Facebook and Instagram. Credit the parent groups and children’s advocates who fought for that and made the states accountable to them.

According to the Times, the settlement’s die was cast before last month’s big trial even began but it took some time to line up agreement from the various states. The key was coming up with a fair allocation of the $18B USD in damages that will go to children’s mental health programs.

In the end, all 49 states fell into line except Texas (which settled separately shortly afterwards) and Florida.

The Florida suit will proceed as will many others, but one would expect that judges will engage in some extraordinary arm twisting in chambers with the plaintiffs’ lawyers to get them to fall in line with the Big Settlement.

Two remaining Big Questions are whether the Meta settlement gets adopted by competitors YouTube, TikTok and Snap and whether the safety upgrades helps Congress get to a deal on federal legislation.

***

Oops.

In my last post I wrote that “a leaked page grab from an internal Canadian Heritage document suggests that the $600 million will cover the $134 million in foregone streamer payments to Canadian audiovisual media funds for broadcast news and Canadian content.”

I made a mistaken assumption about the document’s authorship based on Globe & Mail journalist Barry Hertz’s tweet about the allocation numbers and Heritage Canada failing to confirm or deny to me when I asked if it was a Heritage document.

I have now discovered that the document in question is in fact an industry stakeholder’s summary of what the stakeholder was told verbally by a Heritage Canada source. The stakeholder contacted me this morning to clarify.

Hertz’s tweet indicates that according to Heritage the numbers cited in the stakeholder document were “not final.” I will leave it there.

***

If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;

or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;

or follow @howardalaw on X or Howard Law on LinkedIn.

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

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

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Zuckerberg settles kids’ lawsuit for $18B – doxxing liability for “networked harassment” – Cineplex’s Goliath flexes

(AI illustration)

August 28, 2026

Meta’s big trial settled after only five days of testimony and before CEO Mark Zuckerberg was scheduled to take the stand.

The social media giant just paid off 47 US states with $18 billion (USD) to resolve lawsuits seeking reparations and safety features as a result of online harms allegedly inflicted on American children by its Facebook and Instagram products.

With more lawsuits pending, Meta continues to deny liability.

The big dollar figure equates to four months of Meta’s annual profit but the money will be paid out over 10 years. As well, thirty per cent of the amount is tied to YouTube and TikTok agreeing to a similar settlement.

Regardless, the state Attorneys General crowed victory.

“For years, Meta intentionally deceived the public about the addictive and harmful design features that have wreaked havoc on youth mental health,” according to Virginia Attorney-General Jay Jones. The deal “will put an end to these dangerous practices and deliver meaningful relief that will protect children from online harm.”

The settlement funds will mostly flow to children’s mental health services.

Front-loading meaningful policy action with lawsuits may be anarchic, but it moves the US closer to comprehensive federal regulation of online harms against children and provides a first draft of regulatory digital safety plans. Meta and the Attorneys General would be well aware of that.

Whatever that US regulation ends up looking like —there’s currently head butting between the House of Representatives and the US Senate over the content of digital safety plans— it will be an obvious benchmark for other countries seeking to do the same thing, as Canada is doing with the Liberals’ Bill C-34, The Safe Social Media Act. Given speculation about the apparent agreement at abortive US-Canada trade talks over “digital alignment,” the regulatory footprint in the US becomes even more relevant.

Under the terms of the settlement, there will be a hard two-hour cap for under-18s’ daily screen time, limits on continuous scrolling time, and no access after midnight.

There will be limits on addictive features such as Likes and other emojis. Push notifications will be prohibited during school hours.

Meta will also disable extreme make-up and cosmetic surgery image filters, a nod to concerns about the harmful role of social media in body image. There is no outright ban on so called body image postings.

There are also no limitations on Meta’s algorithmic personalized recommendations. Instead, teens will have an option to adopt a non-personalized feed.

Importantly, most of the hard controls are in the apps’ default settings that can be undone with parental consent. Meta has promised to provide simpler settings and tools for parents.

Of note to policy makers: the age verification protocols that underpin the entire regulatory regime are not concretely sketched out in the settlement. The important details are set as a deliverable from Meta in a year’s time.

That’s no small matter: Meta and YouTube’s Google ownership are looking to foist age verification on each other as legislatures choose between imposing that responsibility on either app stores like Google Play or individual social media apps such as Instagram.

Going forward, the settlement may or may not grease the skids leading to US federal regulation of online harms to children. It depends on YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat responding positively as well as Congressional leaders sorting out their differences over the strength of regulatory standards requiring digital safety plans from social media companies.

The Canadian C-34 makes it clear that a Canadian digital regulator will have the power to set its own standards if the safety features offered by Meta and the other social media companies in their digital safety plans are found wanting. As the ultimate hammer, the regulator can ban youth accounts.

Meta says it is not implementing the terms of settlement in Canada. We will see if that sticks, but Meta might be tempted to retain its leverage to settle the lawsuits filed by Canadian school boards or haggling over the draft of Bill C-34.

***

Michael Geist has a new blog post reporting on a Canadian judge granting an injunction against a social media influencer who triggered a digital mobbing against a Toronto lawyer that included anti-semitic dog whistling and threats to children.

Geist suggests that the injunction could lead to a new “tort” —the basis of civil liability for damages — of “networked harassment.”

***

Barry Hertz has a story in the Globe & Mail providing circumstantial evidence that the dominant Canadian film theatre chain Cineplex squeezes film distributors into exclusive exhibition deals that result in independent theatres losing important films.

The issue came to light when the independent Carlton multiplex theatre in downtown Toronto abruptly lost exhibition rights to Matt Johnson’s new release “Tony,” a biopic of the belated writer and chef Tony Bourdain, just prior to the scheduled opening and after tickets had been pre-sold.

The Carlton is wedged geographically between neighbouring Cineplex theatres. The Toronto-headquartered Cineplex controls 70% of film theatres in Canada.

In the Globe story, the Carlton refers to “the hegemonic theatrical exhibition market share that exists in this country” and invites disgruntled patrons to complain to the Canadian Competition Bureau.

***

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

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

Canada’s age verification bill S-209 faces its first Parliamentary test

October 30, 2025

The Senate’s justice committee will soon be voting on Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne’s Bill S-209, an age verification bill for pornography that was launched in the upper house and will eventually make its way to the House of Commons.

The committee was scheduled to stop hearing witnesses and consider amendments on November 5th but hit a snag on October 29th when a representative of the German online regulator told Senators that the Canadian-owned PornHub had not complied with German law, something that appeared to contradict PornHub lawyer Solomon Friedman‘s testimony on October 8th that PornHub would obey a Canadian law as it had elsewhere, specifically mentioning Louisiana and the United Kingdom. The Senate committee is now considering its options which could mean recalling the fiery PornHub lawyer to answer questions again.

Regardless, the bill will likely get to a committee vote in November and then move on to the full Senate where an earlier version was previously endorsed in 2024 as Bill S-210.

The committee debaters, including Senators, seem to be divided into two groups, one for those that are single-minded in their concern about the privacy risks to porn consumers and another for those fed up with the lack of a policy response to the scourge of violent pornography miseducating children about sex.

UBC law professor Janine Benedet, in the bluntest possible language, described porn as a harmful cultural product sold by companies hiding behind an expansive view of the right to privacy:

UBC professor Janine Benedet – 4 minute video

LCJC meeting no. 8 17-38-02 Download

So far the Senate debate has been preoccupied with adult porn subscribers being outed in a data hack. The policy challenge for the bill is how to avoid, minimize or secure the risk of personal data stolen through hacks, a risk that goes up when Photo ID is required.

That’s why the bill is designed to exploit age estimation as far as possible to dramatically drive down the number of Internet users who would ever have to verify age by submitting ID proof of majority.

Age estimation technology is driven by AI-fueled online surveillance and web scraping: the age-estimating company searches the web or commercially available data for the Internet footprint associated with the viewer’s e-mail address, suggesting either an adult or a child. To the extent that estimation misfires and wrongly concludes the viewer is ineligible as a minor to access porn, the viewer can then submit ID to the age estimator.

The fear of data leaks is an anxiety that can’t be medicated by amending the bill, but likely amendments will be tabled anyway.

Right now, S-209 says that porn sites (which could include social media platforms that allow porn) have to contract with a commercial age verification service that meets federal government standards, including a critical requirement that personal data is digitally expunged as soon as age is verified.

In this regulatory model, thousands of websites or content applications become the age-gaters for porn in partnership with age verification companies. This is how the UK is doing it.

Some US states, like Utah and Texas, have moved the responsibility for age verification further up the chain of online distribution and are hanging the age gating role on apps and content applications (like Meta, X, Google etc.) by making them contract with age verification companies. If age estimation generates false positives and denies age verification to an adult, ID would likely be required.

California has gone one step further up the tech chain. The California bill puts the onus on companies selling device operating systems to require device users to volunteer their age. Perhaps the reason that the state’s Silicon Valley giants endorsed the bill: there’s no ID required at any point.

(An interesting aside, Google’s corporate policy is to use age estimation first, requiring ID if necessary, but only for their own products available in the GooglePlay app store).

The thinking seems to be: the bigger the tech company managing the age estimation task, the better their access to data, and therefore the better their age estimation results.

The downside to moving age verification up the Internet chain is that all adult users of a major online product, like Google Search or Facebook, might be caught in the age verification net, even if they’ve never sought out porn or never will.

Google’s approach to S-209 is generally supportive: it applauds sticking the porn providers with age verification responsibility and opposes PornHub’s view that it’s simpler and less risky to make a few Big Tech companies responsible.

The S-209 amendment that Google is proposing to the Senate is to narrow the scope of porn regulation to online entities that are porn sites by nature, as opposed to most websites, apps and platforms whose overall content is not “primarily intended” for porn. That might let Elon Musk’s X off the hook even though X officially permits porn. (Google’s YouTube does not allow porn, but age-verified adults can find it on Google Search if you disable the SafeSearch default settings. On the other hand, X allows under age children to view pornography if they opt-in).

As drafted, the Bill delegates to a future government regulatory body the line drawing exercise of which online entities with porn content are going to be in or out of the age verification scheme. Age verification could be restricted to conventional porn sites or expanded to a site like X which reputedly is the source of 41% of porn consumption by children.

Critic and law professor Michael Geist told the Senate committee that such an impactful decision on requiring age verification for social media apps or search engines ought to be written right into the legislation, not deferred to a regulator.

Geist does not offer an alternative to S-209 however, other than suggesting the bill be scrapped entirely and the problem of underage consumption of violent pornography punted to a broader Online Harms bill that the government has yet to table.

***

Letter to the Editor: there’s an alternative to S-209 choice of age verification

***

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

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: