You should judge a car’s direction by where its wheels are pointed, not by its turn signals. Bill C-10, currently before Parliament, claims to be about broadcasting. It is not. It is about speech control over the internet.
If you get an electronic version of this thing we call a newspaper, you will have noticed that many articles and columnists now appear by means of embedded video. According to the federal government, video and audio over the internet are “broadcasting,” and if you broadcast you need a licence from the CRTC — either that or be “exempted” (a term of art) from the need to be licensed by the same agency. Do newspapers understand they are broadcasters?
If you speak through the medium of video you are “broadcasting” within Ottawa’s interpretation of the Act and are subject to ferocious penalties for doing so without a licence — as well as to taxes and other conditions even if you do get exempted. True, the Act would exempt those who upload content to a “social media service,” so your tweets would be subject only to such censorship as Twitter imposes, but if you run a podcast or a video download from your own site, you are a “broadcaster.” And social media will be regulated by other planned legislation, so don’t think your postings will escape government supervision.
For many years the CRTC has claimed video sent across the internet is a form of broadcasting, but so far it has had the good sense not to press its luck in the courts by actually trying to regulate video and audio across the internet. To the CRTC and its broadcasting clientele, the internet is a fundamental challenge to the survival of a nationally controlled broadcasting system. In C-10 we see once again that if you can’t beat a new business model, you make it illegal. Or if you prefer, you “extend” and “embrace” the internet by defining video and audio transmissions through the internet as “broadcasting.”
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