Given the extent to which Chinese political interference has been exposed in Canada in recent years, one might have expected the Justin Trudeau-led government to have spearheaded the battle against Bytedance.
If the Conservatives genuinely want to give us back control of our lives and make us the freest people on earth, they could start by stepping back from their recent alliance with Big Government solutions.
Whether the entrenched players like it or not, surely a journalist is anyone with the capability and inclination to uncover and honestly distribute the news, information, and stories the public has a right to know.
Media executives who once campaigned for the Online News Act with sugar-plum visions of Big Tech cash dancing in their heads were left to deal with some pretty serious lumps of coal.
What Canada desperately needs instead is a multi-pronged, coordinated national strategy based on current economic and market realities that will allow journalism to flourish again.
The CRTC’s idea of “modernizing” broadcasting appears heavily weighted in favour of applying its 1990s way of doing things to the online world of 2023.
The bottom line, is that, while it keeps insisting it doesn’t intend to regulate the content of podcasts, it is very concerned about the content of podcasts and if it can’t legally regulate them, it’ll make sure someone else does it for them.
For those of you wondering if the government has managed to salvage at least something from the Bill C-18 debacle by satisfying Google, don’t hold your breath.
Over the past six weeks the news industry had a chance to prove how much the public values it. It has instead revealed the unsettling truth that most of it is nowhere near as fetching, nor as necessary, as the image it self-servingly sees when it looks in the mirror.
Meta has comfortably passed the first test of ensuring that, in a crisis, it can still provide vital information without linking to news. This proves that the government’s assumptions about their online news legislation were and remain dead wrong.
