Category: North America

The Basic Problem: everything was seen as “broadcasting” Occasionally a disaster brings a dose of reality into the consideration of abstract issues. The COVID19 pandemic points out a glaring mistake at the heart of the BTLR report. All over North America, demand for telecommunications services is surging. Businesses are responding by moving on-line as never before. Telephone usage has gone up. People deprived of face-to-face communication wish to communicate by voice calling more frequently, to the degree that some networks are showing strain. Mobile usage has gone down (we are out less), while domestic wi-fi usage has surged. This reaction is a foreseeable consequence of enforced social isolation: greater reliance on telecommunications. The Internet and IP-based technologies are at the centre of helping to organize the economic and social affairs of the nation. Whether it be businesses going on-line, or people using the telephone more often, they are engaging in the increased use of internet-based technologies. People are able to transact business or keep in touch despite isolation. A telephone call now transmits over equipment similar in principle to what makes a website work, and whether your device is fixed or mobile, it runs on IP (Internet Protocol). So do the other newer forms of communication, such as WhatsApp, Zoom, and the like. Nothing surprising here: except that people are not engaged in what we normally understand as “broadcasting”. They are not engaging in few-to-many communication through licensed channels regulated by the Canadian federal government. That much is obvious. Or you would have thought it was obvious. Yet the government-sponsored report on the future of our communications legislation (the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel’s Report) ignored the unique nature of the Internet. In fact, to a degree scarcely credible, it deliberately assimilated very large proportions of ordinary internet traffic, whether video or print, to the tightly regulated scheme of the Canadian Broadcasting Act. Why? Two different kinds of reasoning may be at work here. The first is the issue of subsidies and privileged status. The advent of the Internet, and more precisely large distribution platforms (Netflix, Amazon Prime), have presented an economic challenge to the closely regulated world of Canadian broadcasting. Moreover, the large platforms have also sucked advertising revenue out of the newspaper business. So two powerful client groups have been able to hammer the government with their cries of pain. The broadcasters have always been closely regulated. They are accustomed to world where tax dollars have been available for Canadian program production, and to controlling the flow of subsidies by a close relationship to government cultural agencies. Since the basic cultural issue has been defined as making Canadian television programming, rather than measuring how much or how well it is appreciated by Canadian audiences, broadcasting policy has been focused on producer subsidies, and tight control has been exercised over what is considered Canadian. As to the newspapers, they are in a desperate plight. The efficiency of search engines has stripped them of advertising revenue, and even long-time advocates of the free press are attracted to the idea of receiving government subsidies. While newspapers, particularly the large dailies […]