Category: North America

Tuesday, June 27, 2023 Good afternoon friends and welcome to the 2023 Annual General Meeting. The President will speak shortly and pass on well deserved praise for those who havetoiled for the cause of a free and open Internet. I would be remiss in not mentioning especially Philip Palmer for his many important submissions and appearances before Parliamentary committees, and to Franca Palazzo our executive director, for keeping the ship afloat. Philip celebrates a birthday tomorrow, so we congratulate him on another year of life well lived. Trusting that Philip will say all the right things, I will move to the issue that most concerns me. It is neither C11 or C18, the two laws recently passed that bring chaos and disorder to the Canadian Internet. Nor is it the power of the platforms and what to do about them which, I submit, were susceptible to much more discrete and limited remedies. I am concerned with a rising tide which is seeking after orthodoxy. I do not think C18 or C11 can be adequately explained without factoring in an illiberal tendency in government and in sectors of society that distrust free expression. A recent study for the CATO institute showed that 3 in 10 Americans under thirty wanted government video surveillance in the home, and that the link between younger age groups and this desire was strongly corelated. 1 The distributed and anarchic features of the Internet are proving intolerable to many. It would be difficult to say which factor threatens the Internet more: established commercial interests facing oblivion or the intolerant and anxious spirit of the age. The American social scientist Jonathan Haidt has researched this issue. A generation of young people have been protected from all harm and risk in the material world but exposed to contention and turmoil in the digital. They have come to believe that debate is wrong, as debate implies doubt, and doubt produces anxiety. This has led to a demand that people be protected from feeling “unsafe”. Many people have come to expect that the triumph of justice is impeded, but will not be prevented, by those of differing opinions or beliefs. If governments could just lean hard enough on the dissenting minorities, then the progress of society can be assured. Even if, as I believe, that these are not dissenting minorities, butdissenting majorities. The concerns of anxious safety seekers would be of no effect without government backing. For their own reasons, and in a separate stream of causation, the proponents of more government controls over thoughts and expressions have arrived at the view that the society we live in is fundamentally illegitimate. The attack on the liberal political order is broad and deep and proceeds on several fronts. The constitutional order, with its origins in European colonization of the American continent, is seen to be illegitimate. Worse, it is showing every sign of success. Where it ends, or whether it ends, is unclear, but do not be in doubt: its goal is the delegitimation of pre-existing Canadian society which was, andremains, a liberal one. By liberal I mean a society concerned with […]