Thoughts on the CRTC’s “Harnessing Change: The Future of Programming Distribution in Canada”, Report to the Governor in Council

The problems start with the title. “Harnessing Change” reflects a long history of Canadian governments and the CRTC sticking fingers in holes in the dike of broadcasting policy and regulation, to keep out invading hordes, while communications technologies undermine the dike's foundations — from without and from within — because Canadians have consistently been early, eager and rapid, adopters.  

The FCC Chairman, Ajit Pai, defended the abolition of net neutrality regulation in the United States in the following terms, which imply that, in a duopoly, we have an adequate choice.

My mother turned 100 years old today, on May 29^th, 2018. That is a long time to live. Yet a hundred years is still close to forty years younger than the principle of net neutrality. They did not call it “net neutrality” in the 1870s, they referred to it as “no unjust or undue discrimination”. The term net neutrality was  invented by Professor Tim Wu to dress up some ancient principles of common carriage in a modern guise.

The near weekly dose of pro-incumbent propaganda emerged in the pages of the Financial Post today. The Montreal Economic Institute was at it again, saying that the CRTC can dissolve now that Canada's telecommunications sector is mature and competitive. In the same week another report shows that Canada offers the least amount of bandwidth for the money of any economy in the world.

George Serentschy wrote an interesting piece in Terence Corcoran's Financial Post today, which I think is comprehensively mistaken. Mr. Serentschy, a former telecom regulator in Austria, became dismayed with the state of investment in European mobile networks, and has been testifying effectively against the idea of MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators) ever since.

Multibillionaire Barry Diller used to be chairman of Paramount in the 1980s and has now moved on to the Internet, being the head of Expedia and a number of other ventures. He spoke about the leadership of Netflix recently in the most favourable terms in a recent interview in the New York Times. His thoughts are relevant to those worried about Canadian content.

One of the strengths of the modern military is that they have determined to be and remain "learning organizations": tactics are obsessively analyzed, and information shared among officers, so that battles are won, casualties reduced, and what needs to be changed, is changed. The opposite seems to be true in telecom policy.

You have to hand it to McCarthy’s. Their communications legal luminaries have pursued the goal of subjecting the Internet to the Broadcasting Act since they first became aware of this loathsome innovation, sometime in the mid-2000s, when email attachments  challenged the dominion of the fax machine in the legal profession. (I surmise).

The proposed review of our communications acts is about to proceed, but the problem is finding a significant issue that legislative change would solve. Of course, some improvements are possible. Yet I would gladly forego a few improvements, if the alternative would be to subordinate the Telecom Act to the purposes of the Broadcasting Act.

We are living in an era that combines extreme psychological fragility where people seek the suppression of all opinion that fails to conform to the fragile consensus. Official thought is not just enforced through the state, but through the independent actions of content distribution networks. The censorship is now automated and largely invisible. The censors are proud of their work.

The arguments of the FCC Chairman Ajit Pai seem to amount to the following. Net neutrality regulation will inhibit investment and lead to over-regulation. I am instinctually in favour of some measure of non-discriminatory access to networks, on the basis of Canada's Internet traffic management procedures decision. It is vital to understand those who disagree.

In the field of telecommunications, there are very few ideas. Such ideas about how the industry works are defended because they produce economic advantage for those who currently have legal privileges and the profits generated by them. These ideas are seldom challenged. They are relied upon to defend economic interests.  They lumber along for decades, and are trotted out whenever economic interests are at stake. Who knows? People may even believe them.

Is that too cynical? Not at all.

Nicholas Carr is a a blogger of insight. He has the advantage of paying a lot of attention professionally to Silicon Valley,. He believes that the owning class in the Valley schemes to absorb every moment of your consciousness into their devices. Every moment. His collection of essays is in book form under the title Utopia is Creepy, and I recommend it warmly. The essays are bite-sized aperçus from his blog, Roughtype.

There are days when I am seized with the temptation to cite Ayn Rand with something approaching approval. Discussions of Canadian cultural policy  tend to bring it out. In an excellent article in the Post this weekend by Calum Marsh, the usual outrage is summoned by the Iron Rice Bowlers because Netflix promises to spend $500 million in Canada on television (read video) productions without any state supervision!

Emily Jackson of the Post reports today that

... lower unit price has generally led to an increase in data cap sizes across the OECD’s 35 member countries, which in turn resulted in an explosion of data usage, the report found.

But as of last year Canada remained a laggard when it comes to mobile data usage per mobile subscription. Canadians used an average 1.5 gigabytes of data per month in 2016, landing in 22^nd place for usage, according to the report. In Finland, which led the way, the average subscription used 11 GB per month.

I doubt those in charge the CRTC are more than slightly perturbed. And I doubt that anyone else in Ottawa is ready for the measures that would fix the problem. Because that would involve giving up a shibboleth. After all, with Canada's immense size, is it not just a natural result that usage prices must be high?

I recall the delegation of the Quebec media production types  appearing before us - a panel of CRTC commissioners -  when we were considering the extension of the Broadcasting Act to the Internet. The issue was whether every Canadian website should be licenced by the state, and taxed, to supply funds for Canadian video programming. When asked whether they understood of the scale of government intrusion into communications, one of the panelists slammed her fist on the table and said "regulate it first, then we'll figure out what it means!".

There is a mole in the Minister's office. Maybe she is in the Heritage Department. She (I assume it is a she) is a secret member of the Internet Society of Canada, but we do not know who she is. We give orders in code and one-time paper. She is loyal and obedient, a true nethead, devoted to the cause of net freedom. Do you have a better explanation for the Minister's latest edition of Canada's broadcasting policy?

Bell Canada joins Google as the latest to hop on the censorship bandwagon, although not for reasons of political correctness. With Bell it is about money, which is a small mercy. Apparently people want to leave the regulated system (Gasp! Shock!) and get free stuff.

It is a sobering sight to see a company destroy its moral authority in an instant. Google's firing of James Damore for his polite and well reasoned argument about the company's mindset will have greater negative effect in the long run than any other action the company has taken. You are not being asked to agree with Damore. You do not have to. You are being asked to imagine the significance of turning over the custodianship of all human on-line knowledge to an intolerant cult. Exclusionary intolerance in academia is one thing; seeing it spread into American corporate culture is quite another. Seeing it in action at a company which owns the indexing system of the central library of the Internet is deeply alarming.

A couple of shallow and obvious data points: people continue to exit the regulated broadcasting universe, yet at the same time there has never been so much money poured into scripted television. Or should I say "television", in the same ironic way we still "dial" a telephone?