The battle over contentious Bill C-10 is ongoing. Just Monday, the Liberals, with the help of the Bloc Quebecois in Parliament, voted to end study of the bill, and last week the Liberals, Bloc, and NDP all combined to vote down a proposed Conservative amendment that would have exempted social media content from regulation.
The bill, which if passed would set up the CRTC to regulate online platforms the same way it does traditional platforms, has drawn heavy criticism. Adding now to the chorus of condemnation is former CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein. He joins Michael Geist, the Canada research chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa (and noted critic of the bill himself), on Geist’s Law Bytes podcast to denounce the bill as currently constructed, arguing that it should be scrapped and rewritten altogether.
They discuss net neutrality, recent CRTC decisions, and what a better and more considered approach to internet and broadcast regulation might look like. Commenting on C-10, von Fickenstein says:
“Basically they are looking at the internet through the broadcasting lens. Everything that is sound or video on the internet will now be broadcasting. I don’t know where this idea comes from, and certainly it is totally wrong and not the way you should do it at all. Broadcasting is a small part of the internet, it is not the internet. And to look at the internet wholly through the broadcasting lens is wrong. But that is what they have done.”
