What the CRTC should be doing
Let’s be hopeful that key players in government and the communications industry paid close attention to the forthright speech made Tuesday by outgoing Canadian Radio- television Telecommunications Commission ( CRTC) Chairman Jean-Pierre Blais.
In a talk at the Banff World Media Festival — his last before his tenure as chairman ended Saturday — he expressed his concern that “some people in industry and in government continue to bang their heads against the wall and argue on the margins of traditional institutions when we’re in the midst of a sea change.” That sea change includes the death of print journalism and the increasing pointlessness of Canadian content and production quotas, among other things.
“We have to think beyond our borders and realize that this is a time of profound change, and being nostalgic isn’t the way forward,” he said.
You can imagine what members of ACTRA ( the Canadian performers’ union) must have been thinking: “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
What ACTRA national executive director Stephen Waddell really said about Blais’s chairmanship was that during that time “the CRTC embraced an approach that undermined Canadian storytellers instead of protecting them.”
But Blais is right that “protection” is an outmoded model for supporting Canadian culture. Forcing radio stations to play a minimum number of Justin Bieber tracks is an exercise in futility when most people are streaming their music anyway.
Blais’s take on media producers and broadcasters is solid as well — they’d be wise to start giving more thought to telecom issues ( and less thought to huge subsidies) given how quickly the consumption of online content is growing. It won’t be long before telecommunications and broadcasting are essentially the same thing.
However, Blais presented tired ideas of his own, too.
That the decline of print journalism be met with government money for digitalfirst journalism schools is not exactly a trail-blazing suggestion, nor is holding events to display Canadian musical abilities in lieu of quotas.
A hint at the antiquated and i nflexible nature of even Blais’s ( and certainly ACTRA’s) thinking about Canadian culture can be gleaned by looking to a contemporaneous news story from the private sector for comparison.
On Bloomberg television, Apple’s Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook just told an interviewer that the company is now concentrating on technology for autonomous driving.
Government commissions armed with rule-making authority come up with retail wireless price regulation (one of Blais’s suggestions is to increase wireless competition). Free markets competing for customers come up with selfdriving cars.
Maybe that’s not an entirely fair analogy. But taking an approach pliable enough to adapt quickly to changes in demand, knowledge and circumstances — the sea change that Blais predicts in telecom and broadcasting, for example — is not something government bureaucracy is well-suited to do.
Blais himself told The Globe and Mail in an interview Monday that “regulation, or more direct intervention, is a poor substitute for a properly functioning marketplace.”
But it’s hard to achieve a properly functioning marketplace in an industry that is already mired in so much regulation that it is practically incomprehensible to the average Canadian, who seems mainly focused on complaining about his cellphone rates.
The one constructive thing the CRTC can do is ensure that every Canadian remains free to express himself online — and that means making sure that online communications aren’t censored based on their content or viewpoint. When it comes to speech, the net should be neutral.
But as Mike Godwin and Tom Struble reminded us in a recent Slate op- ed, “net neutrality” is a term that means different things to different people. Some “insist it means that all Internet traffic — whether it be video, audio, interactive, or text — should be treated absolutely equally by Internet infrastructure.” Which just isn’t workable.
The CRTC has already departed from policy in the United States and the European Union by declaring that Internet providers in Canada can’t “zero rate” content — which means exempting certain specific applications or internet services from data caps.
Achieving the delicate balance that keeps the Internet both free for expression and open for innovation is a difficult enough task. The CRTC would do well to focus on that role to the exclusion of inserting itself into active content promotion or cultivation.
Unless you think the CRTC has the potential to become as agile as Apple, the way forward for the commission is to step back and concentrate on clearing the way for the Canadian Apples of tomorrow — while ensuring the little guys are treated the same when they’re fledgling start-ups as they are when they’re giants working on self-driving cars.
BLAIS IS RIGHT THAT “PROTECTION” IS AN OUTMODED MODEL. — MARNI SOUPCOFF