Quotulatiousness

April 30, 2021

Bill C-10, despite frequent government denials, would regulate user-generated content on the internet

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist continues to sound the alarm about the federal government’s bill to vastly increase CRTC control over Canadians’ access to information and entertainment options online, including the Heritage minister’s mendacity when challenged about how the CRTC’s powers will increase to censor individual Canadians in what they post to online services like YouTube:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault and the Liberal government’s response to mounting concern over its decision to remove a legal safeguard designed to ensure the CRTC would not regulate user generated content has been denial. The department’s own officials told MPs that all programming on sites like Youtube would be subject to regulation, yet Guilbeault insisted to the House of Commons that user generated content would be excluded from regulation as part of Bill C-10, his Broadcasting Act reform bill.

However, based on new documents I recently obtained, it has become clear that Guilbeault and the government have misled the Canadian public with their response. In fact, the government effectively acknowledges that it is regulating user generated content in a forthcoming, still-secret amendment to Bill C-10. Amendment G-13, submitted by Liberal MP Julie Dabrusin on April 7th and likely to come before the committee studying the bill over the next week, seeks to amend Section 10(1) of the Broadcasting Act which specifies the CRTC’s regulatory powers. It states:

    (4) Regulations made under paragraph (1)(c) do not apply with respect to programs that are uploaded to an online undertaking that provides a social media service by a user of the service – if that user is not the provider of the service or the provider’s affiliate, or the agent or mandatary of either of them – for transmission over the Internet and reception by other users of the service.

The amendment is a clear acknowledgement that user generated content are programs subject to CRTC’s regulation making power. Liberal MPs may claim the bill doesn’t do this, but their colleagues are busy submitting amendments to address the reality.

But it is not just that the government knew that its changes would result in regulating user generated content. The forthcoming secret amendment only covers one of many regulations that the CRTC may impose. The specific regulation – Section 10(1)(c) of the Broadcasting Act – gives the CRTC the power to establish regulations “respecting standards of programs and the allocation of broadcasting time for the purpose of giving effect to the broadcasting policy set out in subsection 3(1).”

April 17, 2021

“Today’s Liberal government is […] the most anti-Internet government in Canadian history”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Michael Geist gives both barrels to Justin Trudeau’s government, then reloads and fires again:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapture from CPAC video.

As I watched Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault yesterday close the Action Summit to Combat Online Hate, I was left with whiplash as I thought back to those early days. Today’s Liberal government is unrecognizable by comparison as it today stands the most anti-Internet government in Canadian history:

  • As it moves to create the Great Canadian Internet Firewall, net neutrality is out and mandated Internet blocking is in.
  • Freedom of expression and due process is out, quick takedowns without independent review and increased liability are in.
  • Innovation and new business models are out, CRTC regulation is in.
  • Privacy reform is out, Internet taxation is in.
  • Prioritizing consumer Internet access and affordability is out, reduced competition through mergers are in.
  • And perhaps most troublingly, consultation and transparency are out, secrecy is in.

This is not hyperbole. The Action Summit is a case in point. I was part of the planning committee and I am proud that the event produced two days of thoughtful discussion and debate, where the both the importance and complexity of addressing online hate brought a myriad of perspectives, including from the major Internet platforms. There was none of that nuance in Guilbeault’s words, who spoke the evil associated with the “web behemoths” and promised that his legislation would target content and Internet sites and services anywhere in the world provided it was accessible to Canadians. The obvious implications – much discussed in Internet circles in Ottawa – is that the government plans to introduce mandated content blocking to keep such content out of Canada as a so-called “last resort”. When combined with a copyright “consultation” launched this week that also raises Internet blocking, Guilbeault’s vision is to require Internet providers to install blocking capabilities, create new regulators and content adjudicators to issue blocking orders, dispense with net neutrality, and build a Canadian Internet firewall.

If that wasn’t enough, his forthcoming bill will also mandate content removals within 24 hours with significant penalties for failure to do so. The approach trades due process for speed, effectively reducing independent oversight and incentivizing content removal by Internet platforms. Just about everyone thinks this is a bad idea, but Guilbeault insists that “it is in the mandate letter.” In other words, consultations don’t matter, expertise doesn’t matter, the experience elsewhere doesn’t matter. Instead, a mandate letter trumps all. If this occurred under Stephen Harper’s watch, the criticism would be unrelenting.

In fact, one of the reasons that the government finds itself committed to dangerous policy is that it did not conduct a public consultation on its forthcoming online harms bill. Guilbeault was forced yesterday to admit that the public has not been consulted, which he tried to justify by claiming that it could participate in the committee review or in the development of implementation guidelines once the bill becomes law. This alone should be disqualifying as no government should introduce censorship legislation that mandates website blocking, eradicates net neutrality, harms freedom of expression, and dispenses with due process without having ever consulted Canadians on the issue.

April 9, 2021

QotD: Instant expertise

Filed under: Health, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As every journalist and lawyer knows, it takes about half an hour to become an expert on any subject. In the days when I wrote for some of the less cerebral but well-paying publications of the British press, my protestations that I knew nothing whatever of the subject on which they wanted me to write was no discouragement to a commission. At most, it produced a slight prolongation of the deadline — about half an hour, in fact.

One of the effects of the COVID-19 epidemic has been to reveal to a very large percentage of the population the joys of instant expertise. The world now has hundreds of millions, if not several billions, of epidemiologists, virologists, and clinicians, all of whom know best how to deal with the pandemic. The only problem is that their solutions are at variance with one another.

It sometimes seems as if the certainty with which views are held is inversely proportional to the solidity of the factual basis on which they are founded. If commentary on the internet is anything to go by (it might not be, of course, for those who avail themselves of this means of self-expression are a self-selected rather than a representative sample), people often take a religious attitude toward their own doctrine and condemn as heretics all those who express doubts about it. I don’t want to sound like a psychoanalyst, that class of person who believes that he unfailingly knows the real meaning of what is said rather than its merely apparent meaning, but stridency of views is often indicative of unacknowledged uncertainties. Zinc supplementarians and others of the type cling to their beliefs with a fervor that evidence does not merit.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Everyone’s an Expert”, Taki’s Magazine, 2020-10-16.

February 12, 2021

Calls for the federal government’s Broadcasting bill (Bill C-10) to be withdrawn

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Michael Geist updates the situation with the federal government’s attempt to massively rework the Canadian broadcast and internet regulation framework without proper scrutiny or transparency:

I have not been shy about expressing my concerns with the Bill C-10, the Broadcasting Act reform bill. From a 20 part series examining the legislation to two podcasts to a debate with Janet Yale, I have actively engaged on policy concerns involving regulation that extends far beyond the “web giants”, the loss of Canadian sovereignty over broadcast ownership, the threat to Canadian intellectual property, and the uncertainty of leaving many questions to the CRTC to answer. Yet beyond the substance of the bill, in recent days an even more troubling issue has emerged as Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, his Parliamentary Secretary Julie Dabrusin, and the Liberal government abandon longstanding commitments to full consultation, transparency, and parliamentary process.

Last week, I appeared before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage as part of what it is calling a “pre-study” on Bill C-10. In this case, “pre-study” is euphemism for avoiding the conventional parliamentary process. Bill C-10 has not yet passed second reading in the House of Commons and has not been referred to committee for study. There have been extensive debates in the House and last week Conservative MP Michael Kram called for the bill to be withdrawn, noting that politicians could do Canadians a lot of good by “rewriting it from scratch.” That move drew criticism from Guilbeault during an interview at the CMPA Prime Time event, as he called for pressure on the Conservatives to support referring the bill to committee. There are instances of pre-study, but doing so concurrently with second reading makes no sense since a pre-study allows for a wide range of amendments, whereas after second reading the permitted amendments are more limited.

In an earlier era (or with a different government), the prospect of conducting a study of the bill while simultaneously engaging in second reading would garner loud objections. In fact, at the Heritage Committee hearing last week, opposition MPs wondered why they were already being asked for amendments to the bill when they had yet to hear from witnesses, much less conduct an actual study of the bill. Indeed, for a government that once prized itself on robust consultation, it seemingly now wants to avoid any genuine consultation on Bill C-10, content to have potential amendments presented through lobbyists, rather than on the public record in open hearings.

The secrecy does not end there. At the same hearing (I was a witness and waited patiently for these issues to play out), Conservative MPs raised questions about promised data on how the government had arrived at claims that the bill will generate over $800 million in new money. Leaving aside the fact that Guilbeault has often inflated that figure to over $1 billion, there has no public disclosure about the source of this claim. Cartt.ca reports that officials told the committee that the calculations could be “confusing” without a verbal explanation. Days later, Dabrusin told the committee that in fact the data had been provided to the committee late last year but perhaps not distributed to committee members.

When I was questioned by Conservative MP Kevin Waugh during my appearance before the committee, he again raised concerns about the claim. Dabrusin interjected with a point of order to make it clear that the data had been provided to the committee, albeit not distributed to MPs. What made the exchange so striking was that Dabrusin – a parliamentary secretary – seemingly did not give any thought to the fact that the data has not been made publicly available. Promoting long overdue disclosures to a handful of MPs while the public is kept in the dark is hardly the stuff worthy of praise or a point of order.

February 6, 2021

“WebMD is the Internet’s most important source of medical information. It’s also surprisingly useless”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Health, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Scott Alexander discusses why WebMD is not the be-all and end-all of internet medical resources:

WebMD is the Internet’s most important source of medical information. It’s also surprisingly useless. Its most famous problem is that whatever your symptoms, it’ll tell you that you have cancer. But the closer you look, the more problems you notice. Consider drug side effects. Here’s WebMD’s list of side effects for a certain drug, let’s call it Drug 1:

    Upset stomach and heartburn may occur. If either of these effects persist or worsen, tell your doctor or pharmacist promptly. If your doctor has directed you to use this medication, remember that he or she has judged that the benefit to you is greater than the risk of side effects. Many people using this medication do not have serious side effects. Tell your doctor right away if you have any serious side effects, including: easy bruising/bleeding, difficulty hearing, ringing in the ears, signs of kidney problems (such as change in the amount of urine), persistent or severe nausea/vomiting, unexplained tiredness, dizziness, dark urine, yellowing eyes/skin. This drug may rarely cause serious bleeding from the stomach/intestine or other areas of the body. If you notice any of the following very serious side effects, get medical help right away: black/tarry stools, persistent or severe stomach/abdominal pain, vomit that looks like coffee grounds, trouble speaking, weakness on one side of the body, sudden vision changes or severe headache.

And here’s their list of side effects for let’s call it Drug 2:

    Nausea, loss of appetite, or stomach/abdominal pain may occur. If any of these effects persist or worsen, tell your doctor or pharmacist promptly. Remember that your doctor has prescribed this medication because he or she has judged that the benefit to you is greater than the risk of side effects. Many people using this medication do not have serious side effects. This medication can cause serious bleeding if it affects your blood clotting proteins too much. Even if your doctor stops your medication, this risk of bleeding can continue for up to a week. Tell your doctor right away if you have any signs of serious bleeding, including: unusual pain/swelling/discomfort, unusual/easy bruising, prolonged bleeding from cuts or gums, persistent/frequent nosebleeds, unusually heavy/prolonged menstrual flow, pink/dark urine, coughing up blood, vomit that is bloody or looks like coffee grounds, severe headache, dizziness/fainting, unusual or persistent tiredness/weakness, bloody/black/tarry stools, chest pain, shortness of breath, difficulty swallowing.

Drug 1 is aspirin. Drug 2 is warfarin, which causes 40,000 ER visits a year and is widely considered one of the most dangerous drugs in common use. I challenge anyone to figure out, using WebMD’s side effects list alone, that warfarin is more dangerous than aspirin. I think this is because if WebMD said “aspirin is pretty safe and most people don’t need to worry about it”, people might use aspirin irresponsibly, die, and then their ghosts might sue WebMD. Or if WebMD said “warfarin can be dangerous, be careful with this one”, people might refuse to take warfarin because “the Internet said it was dangerous”, die of the stuff warfarin is supposed to treat, and then their ghosts might sue WebMD. WebMD solves this by never giving the tiniest shred of useful information to anybody.

This is actually a widespread problem in medicine. The worst offender is the FDA, which tends to list every problem anyone had while on a drug as a potential drug side effect, even if it obviously isn’t. This got some press lately when Moderna had to disclose to the FDA that one of the coronavirus vaccine patients got struck by lightning; after a review, this was declared probably unrelated. For the more serious version of this, read Get Ready For False Side Effects. Why does the FDA keep doing this if they know it makes their label information useless? My guess is it’s because they don’t want to look like cowboys who unprincipledly consider some things but not other things. What if someone accused the person deciding what things to consider of being biased? So the FDA comes up with a Procedure, and once you have a Procedure it has to be “take everything seriously”, and then it falls on random small-fry people who aren’t the FDA to pick up the slack and explain which side effects are worth worrying about or not, and then those small fries don’t do that, because they could get sued.

I think the same concern motivates WebMD diagnosing everything as cancer. If they said something other than cancer, then people might sigh with relief, not bother to get a cancer screening, die from some weird cancer that doesn’t present the way normal cancers do, and then their ghosts might sue WebMD.

Of course, WebMD and other online medical information sites didn’t invent hypochondria, they merely made it easier to do to yourself what Jerome K. Jerome did one fine London morning in 1888:

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch — hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into — some fearful, devastating scourge, I know — and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever — read the symptoms — discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it — wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance — found, as I expected, that I had that too, — began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically — read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee. […] I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

January 30, 2021

“The only thing ‘dangerous’ about a gang of Reddit investors blowing up hedge funds is that some of us reading about it might die of laughter”

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Matt Taibbi says “Suck it, Wall Street!”

Meme stolen from Ace of Spades H.Q.

The press conveyed panic and moral disgust. “I didn’t realize it was this cultlike,” said short-seller Andrew Left of Citron Research, without irony denouncing the campaign against firms like his as “just a get rich quick scheme.” Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin said the Redditor campaign had “no basis in reality,” while Dr. Michael Burry, the hedge funder whose bets against subprime mortgages were lionized in The Big Short, called the amateur squeeze “unnatural, insane, and dangerous.”

The episode prompted calls to regulate Reddit and, finally, halt action on the disputed stocks. As I write this, word has come out that platforms like Robinhood and TD Ameritrade are curbing trading in GameStop and several other companies, including Nokia and AMC Entertainment holdings.

Meaning: just like 2008, trading was shut down to save the hides of erstwhile high priests of “creative destruction.” Also just like 2008, there are calls for the government to investigate the people deemed responsible for unapproved market losses.

The acting head of the SEC said the agency was “monitoring” the situation, while the former head of its office of Internet enforcement, John Stark, said, “I can’t imagine there isn’t an open investigation and probably a formal order to find out who’s on these message boards.” Georgetown finance professor James Angel lamented, “it’s going to be hard for the SEC to find blatant manipulation,” but they “owe it to look.” The Washington Post elaborated:

    To establish manipulation that runs afoul of securities laws, Angel said regulators would need to prove traders engaged in “an intentional act to push a price away from its fundamental value to seek a profit.” In market parlance, this is typically known as a pump-and-dump scheme …

Even Nancy Pelosi, when asked about “manipulation” and “what’s going on on Wall Street right now,” said “we’ll all be reviewing it,” as if it were the business of congress to worry about a bunch of day traders cashing in for once.

The only thing “dangerous” about a gang of Reddit investors blowing up hedge funds is that some of us reading about it might die of laughter. That bit about investigating this as a “pump and dump scheme” to push prices away from their “fundamental value” is particularly hilarious. What does the Washington Post think the entire stock market is, in the bailout age?

H/T to Larry Correia for the link.

January 28, 2021

GameStop in a very different kind of game

Filed under: Business, Gaming, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh looks at the fascinating gyrations of GameStop’s share price in the grip of an unexpected group of players in the market:

“GameStop” by JeepersMedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0

GameStop has long been seen by institutional investors as following down the road of Blockbuster Video: it’s a bricks-and-mortar retailer whose main product is downloadable from your sofa. For that reason, it is heavily shorted by professional funds who normally eschew short-selling, which does have the risky feature of potentially infinite negative downside.

Enter Reddit, the website for special-interest user forums of all kinds. A Reddit “Wall Street bets” board uncovered evidence in regulatory filings that some hedge funds had legitimately dangerous large short positions representing bets against GameStop’s flaccid share price. A few hobby investors began to buy GameStop out of a sense of adventure and perhaps nostalgic loyalty. More importantly, they began to preach the gospel to others.

This is explicit “market manipulation,” but done in the open; it is surely as legal as any other conversation. GameStop’s price (NYSE symbol: GME) surged upward as word spread amongst day traders and other amateur investors. And as the random-looking rise in price got noticed, the whole scheme, itself rather reminiscent of a video game, went viral.

As of Jan. 12, GME was below $20, which is about where most analysts thought it belonged on merit, or lack thereof. The price as I type this particular sentence is $328.81. The backs of some funds with heavy short positions have been broken.

High finance seems somewhat terrified, as amateur investing websites — ones pioneered by the financial industry itself — begin to throw roadblocks in front of late-arriving GME buyers. For itself, Wall Street will invest billions replacing copper wire with fiber optics to gain microsecond arbitrage advantages in the market; for you and I, the good old portfolio can get conveniently 404ed for an afternoon.

This suggests that Wall Street may not have reckoned with the full possibilities of a world of proletarian shareholders. The stock market has proverbially been a playground of “animal spirits” since long before John Maynard Keynes used that phrase in 1936. What happens to an ecosystem when new animals show up? One can surely count on at least a minimum of chaos; maybe the surprise is that it took so long to take this game-like, combative form.

December 20, 2020

QotD: Online literacy

Filed under: Education, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In the various fora and social media circles in which I run, there’s a self-selecting bias toward literacy. Thoughts tend to be expressed in complete sentences with reasonably correct grammar and punctuation.

But sometimes I’ll find myself looking at the posts of a Facebook friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend and I see these random aggregations of misspelled words. They have the occasional capital letter or punctuation mark thrown in, as though the writer knew they were supposed to include those, but not how or why.

And I find myself wondering “What’s it like inside their head?” I mean, you’d probably be going through life slightly angry, thinking everybody was secretly laughing at you behind their hands, that there was some arcane code of keyboard use you were violating. The whole internet would be like one of those fancy restaurants with too much silverware and you never know which implement to use to eat which dish.

Tamara Keel, “I’ve always wondered…”, view from the porch, 2018-08-24.

December 2, 2020

Bill C-10, An Act to amend the Broadcasting Act hijack the internet

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Line, Josh Dehass outlines the benign-sounding claimed intent of Bill C-10 and the malign reality if it is implemented as written:

Bill C-10 would expand the term “broadcasters” to include online content creators. This means that after decades of a mostly regulation-free Internet, the CRTC will soon have a say in what content you can and can’t see on services like Netflix, Amazon Video and Spotify. The bill says these “broadcasters” will be required to “serve the needs and interests of all Canadians — including Canadians from racialized communities and Canadians of diverse ethnocultural backgrounds, socio-economic statuses, abilities and disabilities, sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions, and ages — and reflect their circumstances and aspirations, including equal rights, the linguistic duality and multicultural and multiracial nature of Canadian society and the special place of Indigenous peoples within that society.”

In the Globe and Mail Guilbeault helpfully translated from Newspeak: broadcasters now must create “Indigenous programming,” and possibly other forms of mandatory content by and for minority groups. Guilbeault said that the mandatory Indigenous programs are necessary to correct the “historical mistake” that Canada made when it denied Indigenous people their cultural expression. That historical mistake apparently cannot corrected solely by forcing Canadians to fund APTN and non-stop Indigenous content at CBC. Only when every private company is co-opted in the mission will the mistake be corrected.

It’s bad enough that this new law will require Canadians to pay for shows and podcasts that they’re unlikely watch. What’s really disturbing is that this new law means any large company that wants to produce artistic and cultural content online in Canada will no longer be permitted to devote their time and money exclusively to expressing the ideas that they wish [to] express. Instead, they will be forced to also express the ideas the government wishes them to express. This is compelled speech, which is the term lawyers use when the government forces you to mouth its message. This is contrary the spirit of free expression rights that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees.

The new policy might strike you as old-fashioned broadcast regulation. It isn’t. The theory behind the original Broadcast Act was that the airwaves were a finite resource, requiring the government to act as referee. Otherwise, we could end up consuming nothing but low-brow American cultural products rather than high-brow CanCon like Family Feud Canada and Hedley. This was an elitist argument, since it assumed that individual consumers weren’t capable of determining what content is in their own interests, but at least it made a little sense, because it was theoretically possible for important programming like news to get completely crowded out. The Internet, on the other hand, is effectively infinite. There’s room for everyone’s content in the online marketplace of ideas. So far, it’s worked wonderfully. Virtual nobodies can find huge audiences without big money to get started. There’s really no reason for the government to interfere.

November 21, 2020

“Ah, and so it begins. The problematization of Substack”

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Writing — appropriately — on Substack, Jen Gerson outlines her transition from full-time journalist to journalist-subsisting-on-the-crumbs-of-direct-reader-support at The Line:

True story: an ambitious young man with an idea for a startup gave me a ring on the phone. He wanted to start a new platform for writers and journalists; what would it take to encourage a writer like me to abandon the mainstream media and go fully independent? I explained the sort of site that might entice me — a clean and painless user interface, basic word processor, and something to take care of IT and payment back end. I then hung up the phone and thought to myself: “Nice guy. Too bad that idea isn’t going anywhere.”

After all, why would I abandon paying gigs in mainstream journalism for the uncertainty of direct reader support? It was a crazy idea.

Years passed.

Well, this gentleman went off to form a company called, uh, Substack, and after Andrew Sullivan left New York Magazine to reconstitute the Daily Dish under the aegis on this very platform, I was forced to dredge up this gentleman’s email and offer to eat my hat.

Because by then, mainstream media was in a state of financial and moral disarray and it was time for me to do what I would have done three years earlier if I had possessed the foresight — start The Line. In any case, the founder of Substack was very kind and even managed to schedule a call with me, at which point I said: “OK, you were right.”

This was one of the conversations that eventually led to my co-founding this fine newsletter that you are reading now, but in the course of this chat I had to ask another question: “You know they’re going to come after you, right? Are you ready for that?”

He said Substack is, indeed, committed to serving its community of writers — provided they aren’t spreading hate or disinformation, of course — but I suspect the company is only beginning to gain a glimpse of the test ahead.

When I read the Columbia Journalism Review‘s piece “The Substackerati“, released this week, my first response was: “Ah, and so it begins. The problematization of Substack.”

About that “Canadian content crisis” the feds are trying to “fix” with Bill C-10

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist begins a series of posts on the ongoing blunder that is the federal government’s “get money from the web giants” proposed legislation:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapure from CPAC video.

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault rose in the House of Commons yesterday for the second reading of Bill C-10, his Internet regulation bill that reforms the Broadcasting Act. Guilbeault told the House that the bill would level the playing field, that it would establish a high revenue threshold before applying to Internet streamers, would not impact consumer choice, or raise consumer costs. He argued that even if you don’t believe in cultural sovereignty, you should still support his bill for the economic benefits it will bring, warning that Canadian producers will miss out on a billion dollars by 2023 if the legislation isn’t enacted. He painted a picture of Internet companies (invariably called “web giants”) that have millions of Canadian subscribers but do not contribute to the Canadian economy.

Guilbeault is wrong. He is wrong in his description of the bill (it does not contain thresholds), wrong about its impact on consumers (it is virtually certain to both decrease choice and increase costs), wrong about the contributions of Internet streamers (who have been described as the biggest contributor to Canadian production), wrong about level playing field claims (incumbent broadcasters enjoy a host of regulatory benefits not enjoyed by streamers), wrong about the economic impact of the bill (it is likely to decrease investment in the short term), and wrong about cultural sovereignty (it surrenders cultural sovereignty rather than protect it).

With the bill starting its Parliamentary review, this is the first in a new series of posts on why a careful examination of the data and the bill itself reveals multiple blunders. There are good arguments for addressing the sector, including tax reform, privacy upgrades, and competition law enforcement. There are also benefits to updating the Broadcasting Act, but in an effort to cater to a handful of vocal lobby groups over the interests of the broader Canadian public, Guilbeault’s bill will cause more harm than good. The series will run each weekday for the next month, first addressing the weak policy foundation that underlies Bill C-10, then a series a posts on the uncertainty the bill creates, a review of the trade threats it invites, and an assessment of its likely impact on consumers and the broader public.

The series begins with a post on the fictional Canadian content “crisis.” Canadians can be forgiven for thinking that the shift to digital and Internet streaming services has created a crisis on creating Canadian content. Canadian cultural lobby groups regularly claim that there is one (Artisti, CDCE) and Guilbeault tells the House of Commons that billions of dollars for the sector is at risk. Yet the reality is that spending on film and television production in Canada is at record highs. This includes both certified Canadian content and so-called foreign location and service production in which the production takes place in Canada (thereby facilitating significant economic benefits) but does not meet the narrow criteria to qualify as “Canadian.” I have written before about the need to revisit the Canadian content qualification rules which enable productions with little connection to Canada to receive certification and some that directly meet the goal of “telling Canadian stories” that fail to do so.

November 18, 2020

The Consumer Privacy Protection Act

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Michael Geist looks at Bill C-11, which was introduced by Navdeep Bains on Tuesday:

Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.

Canada’s privacy sector privacy law was born in the late 1990s at a time when e-commerce was largely a curiosity and companies such as Facebook did not exist. For years, the privacy community has argued that Canada’s law was no longer fit for purpose and that a major overhaul was needed. The pace of reform has been frustrating slow, but today Innovation, Science and Industry Minister Navdeep Bains introduced the Consumer Privacy Protection Act (technically Bill C-11, the Digital Charter Implementation Act), which represents a dramatic change in how Canada will enforce privacy law. The bill repeals the privacy provisions of the current Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and will require considerable study to fully understand the implications of the new rules.

This post covers six of the biggest issues in the bill: the new privacy law structure, stronger enforcement, new privacy rights on data portability, de-identification, and algorithmic transparency, standards of consent, bringing back PIPEDA privacy requirements, and codes of practice. These represent significant reforms that attempt to modernize Canadian law, though some issues addressed elsewhere such as the right to be forgotten are left for another day. Given the changes – particularly on new enforcement and rights – there will undoubtedly be considerable lobbying on the bill with efforts to water down some of the provisions. Moreover, some of the new rules require accompanying regulations, which, if the battle over anti-spam laws are a model, could take years to finalize after lengthy consultations and (more) lobbying.

Trudeau’s internet policy — cash grab or power grab? Embrace the healing power of “and” (TM Instapundit)

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Canadian government is taking advantage of the ongoing economic and social disruption of the Wuhan Coronavirus to widen their existing regulation of both broadcasting and internet entertainment. It’s not just a bit of maple-flavoured cultural imperialism, but it’s also a blatant cash grab:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapture from CPAC video.

I see, in the Globe and Mail, that Justin Trudeau and Steven Guilbeault want to further regulate the broadcasting services in Canada. Their goals seem to be, in part, a cash grab ~ online streaming services, like Netflix, are offering Canadians, for a price, what they want, while the CBC offers Canadians, thanks to a $1+ Billion annual subsidy from taxpayers like you and me, what we, pretty clearly, do not want to watch and the Liberals want a share of that money ~ and also an appeal to those who play identity politics.

I think we need to look at the “products” of broadcasting ~ information (news and “public affairs” and documentary programmes) and entertainment, including sports, as “consumable products,” rather like food and, say, soft drinks.

We do allow, even demand that governments exercise some important regulatory functions in regard to food and soft drinks: we want to make sure that they are safe to consume and Canadians want to know what is in the food we consume.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) was, originally, conceived to solve a fairly simple problem: allocating broadcast licences. Government engineers calculated how many radio channels could be used in any given place but they didn’t want to have to decide who should get to use them. Politicians didn’t want to do it, either, because while the successful applicant was (usually) happy the more numerous unsuccessful ones were disappointed and politicians hate to disappoint people. Thus they created an arms length agency to make the tough decisions for them. Licence allocation is still an important job for the CRTC. But the CRTC’s mandate was expanded with the birth of cable TV. Companies, like Rogers, built cable systems ~ and they received both direct and indirect government support to reach more and more Canadians ~ and then “sold” access to consumers. In the normal course of events one might have thought that the government would attach some business conditions to its loans, grants and tax deductions, but there was an ever-growing demand, from the Canadian cultural community ~ based almost entirely in Montreal and Toronto ~ to regulate the fledgling cable and “pay TV” market to ensure that Canadian programmes were not shut out but, in fact, could have privileged positions in the cable lineup, which led to the government, in the 1960s, telling the CRTC to regulate how companies like Famous Players, Maclean Hunter and Rogers configured the private product they sold to individual consumers.

The initial government argument was “we regulate all kinds of things for the common good: that’s why we all drive on the right, for example, and the delivery of broadcasting by cable is like that.” “No it’s not,” the cable operators replied, “you build and maintain the roads, using taxpayers’ dollars, so you’re allowed to regulate how they’re used, plus it’s a safety issue. Cable service and ‘pay TV’ are private, commercial transactions between us, the companies who built and operate the systems, and the individual consumer who wants to subscribe to what we offer. You don’t presume to regulate, beyond the laws against libel and pornography, what people can read in MacLean’s magazine or the Globe and Mail, why is ‘pay TV’ and cable different?” It’s still a good question. But the cable operators surrendered gracefully and the CRTC has been, broadly, for the last half-century, protective of the rights of incumbents in the infotainment markets. In return the cable and internet operators have agreed to “tiers” of programming which means that if you want to watch, say, BBC World Service or Deutsche Welle or Fox News, you must also pay for CBC News Network and CTV News Channel and, no matter who you are and what your individual preferences might be, when you subscribe to a cable/internet service you must also support a number of French stations/channels; it’s the law. And now Minister Guilbault wants to ensure that you pay for the output of indigenous producers, writers, actors and so on, on both indigenous networks ~ to which you must already subscribe if you have a “basic” Canadian cable or satellite TV package ~ and, it appears to me, in programmes produced by Canadians and even by Netflix.

November 14, 2020

“… we all know that Wrong Opinions Are No Longer Allowed On The Internet”

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jen Gerson has some Wrong Opinions that she shared On The Internet, so Dr. Bradley Mitchelmore, BSc. (Pharm), ACPR, PharmD, RPh has has taken it upon himself to try to get her cancelled:

Firstly, to explain how this little gem fell into my lap, some context is required. While I was avoiding the interminably dull task of invoicing our fine writers of The Line the other day, I threw out a position that some might find controversial.

That is, I find the trend towards identifying women by terms like “birthing people,” “menstruators,” “front-hole possessors” and “uterus bearers,” to be both reductive and offensive. I have no objection to finding more inclusive language for circumstances in which we want to acknowledge trans and non-binary people (ie; a phrase like “pregnant people” seems clunky, but inoffensive to me); but to date, all of this new language reduces the class of “women” to either a biological function or a bodily part.

Pregnancy is a particularly sensitive topic for a lot of women because, for most of us, the process is terrifying. To go through childbirth is the most profound loss of bodily autonomy imaginable and many women I know struggle with the after effects of feeling as if we’ve been treated like interchangeable breeding sows by some doctors and nurses. If a doctor started calling me a “birther” or a “uterus-bearer” while stretching my cervix apart knuckles-deep with two fingers, my response would not be welcoming.

I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that linguistic shifts that re-frame an entire biological sex class as “breeders” only ever seems to target one sex. Very few well-intentioned and committed activists are waging war online over the definition of “men.”

A lot of this is misogyny gilded in progressive language. And very few women want to stand up to the misogyny on the “pro-woman” team, nor suffer the consequences of pissing that team off. So most stay silent until they see a tweet like the one above, at which point they flood my DMs with private statements of support and relief. I’m happy to serve as a psychological outlet in that regard, but I’ll show you in a moment why they’re so afraid to say what they think.

Anyway, this is all just my opinion. I’m not married to it. If the trend comes around to allowing us to call all “male-bodied” people “dicks,” I might reconsider the position entirely. But we all know that Wrong Opinions Are No Longer Allowed On The Internet and therefore a doctor jumped in with one of the most delightfully fatuous replies I’ve ever received.

November 13, 2020

Oddly, the Canadian media evince no interest whatsoever in the Trudeau government’s malign plans for the Internet

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Peter Menzies shows how little the mainstream media outlets in Canada care about the power grab the feds are attempting with their proposed “get money from web giants” shakedown:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapure from CPAC video.

In order to understand where media and public attention has been the past couple of weeks, all you had to do was listen in on Monday morning’s Ottawa news conference.

Six days after Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault had introduced ground-breaking legislation to regulate content online, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced more cash to bring better Internet to rural and remote communities. There were also some COVID-19 updates and something about help for agriculture.

And, of course, the questions asked by the media were about the U.S. election. What else could possibly be of interest?

Eventually there were a few inquiries about Telesat and low-Earth-orbit satellites, but you get the point: things that matter to people’s daily lives such as cable bills, data plans, Netflix, cellular service, crappy WiFi and slow Internet connections haven’t been of much interest to Canadian media lately.

So there has been a dearth of chatter about Guilbeault’s controversial plan to (my words, not his): restrict consumer choice, tax Netflix to finance certified Canadian content (Cancon) and bring to an end the greatest period of prosperity in the history of the Canadian film and television industry. Did I mention stifling innovation, increasing streaming subscription costs and scaring away investment? No? My bad. Those too.

Guilbeault has decided that the agency dedicated to defining the nation’s TV and radio diet — the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) — is now going to be in charge of what you are allowed to dine on online as well. No longer will you be able to manage your preferences. No more popcorn and candy for you. Going forward, Cancon spinach and broccoli will be on your plate every evening. Breathtakingly, Guilbeault has “modernized” communications legislation by giving authority over the Internet to something called a “radio-television” commission by using something still called the “broadcasting” act.

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