News, CanCon, and Control Of Canada's Internet
Neither the CRTC’s decision to increase levies on on-line broadcasters in order to contribute additional funds to Canadian content, nor the government’s decision to force a review of that decision while directly injecting public funds, will solve the problem. Along with the abject failure of the Online News Act, government intervention in the Internet is doomed to failure if addressed on our own and as purely a question of money.
Through the age of traditional broadcast media, we put significant emphasis on Canadian content, ‘CanCon’ for short. Today, just about the hardest place in the world to see Canadian content is in Canada. I have referenced it many times over the years in different fora, but my favourite example of this is a Cineflix production known as Mayday, a TV show that has been running for 26 seasons offering clinical analysis of plane crashes, airing in multiple languages in nearly every country in the world.
But if you are in Canada, the only way you can legally watch the full run of this Canadian-made show is with a Crave account, Bell Canada’s streaming service. The first 20 seasons of the show were available on DVD (until the distributor went out of business) in several other countries, but were region-encoded and no version was available here in the country in which it was produced. You could buy the DVD sets on line from Australia or the United Kingdom, but you would also need to buy a region-free DVD player as they were encoded against the North American market.
It is, of course, Bell’s right to maintain a domestic monopoly on the content it purchases or produces while maximising availability in other markets, but it speaks to the real problems Canada has across its content creation and media industries: namely, media ownership and vertical integration.
While the $600 million the government is committing to directly funding Canadian content is welcome, it is hard to imagine that this money won’t be absorbed by Canada’s media and telecommunications oligopoly.
There are a number of regulatory and legal solutions we should be considering alongside direct funding that might actually begin to solve our internet and foreign-dominated content woes. None will be popular with the telecommunications lobbyists well-paid to prevent such outcomes from coming to be.
The first is breaking the vertical integration of Canada’s media giants. Production and distribution of content should be separate. Our internet service providers should not also be our newscasters, content creators, and cell phone providers. The government must examine the big three telecommunications providers from an anti-trust perspective to increase genuine competition at all levels of the information and entertainment supply chain.
If we lack the public imagination and political will to nationalise our fixed and mobile Internet service providers as the public infrastructure that they are, they must at least be regulated to neutrally provide equitable service to Canadians on both sides of the connection, the creators and the consumers.
The second is to state that any Canadian production that receives any public funds must be made reasonably available to all Canadians. Funding our domestic cultural production needs is at the centre of the purpose of government, but public funding of private profits needs to come to an end across the economy. If we are funding a public good, it is because it is a public good. It needs to be administered and regulated with that as a central premise.
The third is through regulation. Social media giants and what the CRTC calls Internet broadcasters like Netflix and Youtube have to be given legal parameters around how they work, how they filter, and what they label.
If we go to the grocery store, we have country of origin labelling laws that affect every product we buy. The internet has no such requirement, but there is no reason that it could not be done. Internet content providers including social media companies could easily be required to place clear country of origin labelling on all content, and be forced to provide country-of-origin filters.
It would not be unreasonable to open Netflix and be able to specifically select Canadian content, for example. It would be even better if there were a Canadian streaming service that syndicated rather than limited our own cultural production. Both the National Film Board and the CBC already offer their own streaming services, but are among the most siloed of those available to Canadians.
Facebook being required to list country-of-origin based on the owner of the content, as well as the physical location from where it was uploaded where applicable, could be quite informative on that score. X’s voluntary disclosure of country-of-origin for its user accounts has been enlightening, although also demonstrated the technical challenges of identifying physical traffic sources in the age of tor nodes and VPNs.
It would not be effective to do any of this on our own, as the Online News Act has allowed social media giants to essentially ignore Canada, however Canada and Europe are in a cooperative mood at the moment. Synchronising our Internet content policies would serve to make them far more effective for all of us. Europe has been effective in using its sheer market weight to force changes like USB-C charger compatibility for iPhones, for example, something that Canada could never achieve on its own.
On the news and information side, we should also be considering legal changes to make the knowing production or distribution of objectively false or misleading information to be an offence. For both news and general content, Internet broadcasters and social media providers must also be required to offer unfiltered content streams not curated by reaction-based algorithms.
Attacking both misinformation and the emotional feedback loop that makes it profitable is critical to reclaiming the Internet as a valuable and productive feature of our society, rather than the means of its own destruction. Foreign-funded misinformation will out-score quality domestic content in every algorithm.
Producing, identifying, and labelling Canadian content is only half the battle, of course. $600 million of publicly funded content that nobody wants to watch would not materially advance the cause of our domestic culture. Nor is Canadian content that Canadians have to jump through additional hoops to watch in Canada in any meaningful way beneficial.
Mandating clear country of origin labelling and filtering would provide the data needed to direct public funds toward the type of domestic content that Canadians actually want, if we have the patience to make this a multi-year project. Ensuring publicly-funded Canadian content is available to Canadians will also ensure that this data is of some empirical value.
There is a caveat to all of this, though. Any such regulation has to be approached with caution. Canada’s lawful access regime currently winding its way through the House as Bill C-22 and through a soon-to-be introduced bill on age limits for certain Internet activities offers a warning. Any data the government collects has to be limited in scope, existing to control funding flows, not toward infringing the rights and privacy of the public.
Money alone is not the solution to our digital culture woes, especially if it exists as just another gift to the media oligopoly. Asserting the role of the government through anti-trust action and thoughtful regulation in concert with other countries, though, might at least start us on the right track.