Yesterday a new report was put out by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) and the consultancy firm CAB hired to do the report, Communications Management Inc (CMI): Broadcasting in Canada 2025. https://www.cab-acr.ca/resources/broadcasting-in-canada-2025/ Here’s my quick analysis of the CMI/CAB report. TLDR: Some of the report’s points about the systemic transformation of broadcasting in…
Last week, the Liberal Government introduced the Online News Act. The Act’s main aim is to redress the dominant market power that Google and Facebook have amassed by building an online advertising system around third-party content, including news, and people’s online activities. Canada is not alone in taking steps to rein in “big tech”. In [ ]
The Emergencies Act: Time to Bring in its Never-Before-Used Powers? Last week, on Feb. 14, the federal government introduced a motion to invoke the Emergencies Act to quell the, then three-week long occupation of Ottawa as well as other blockades set up in Emerson, Manitoba, Coutts, Alberta and the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Ontario. As [ ]
How fitting that the day after groundhog day, here we are once again assessing whether Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act (or Broadcasting Act reform bill) introduced yesterday, is any better than the one that failed to become law last year? The short answer is, there have been some important improvements to address critics concerns, [ ]
Bill C10, the Broadcasting Act reform bill, has set off a firestorm of controversy. Originally presented as being all about revising the Broadcasting Act to bring online audio and visual streaming media services like Netflix, Crave, Spotify, and so on into its reach, the bill has taken on far wider and worrying prospects. This is [ ]
A new bill being before the Australian parliament would require Google and Facebook to pay news media organizations for the news content they use as part of their online search and social media services. Australia’s proposed “News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code” would also establish a new code of conduct to address the [ ]
Just over a week ago, the International Journal of Communication published an article that I co-authored with Jeff Pooley, “A Curious Tale of Economics and Common Carriage (Net Neutrality) at the FCC”—a reply to another IJOC article published in late March by Gerald Faulhaber, Hal Singer and Augustus Urschel that had claimed that economics was [ ]
Today, the International Journal of Communication published my reply (co-authored with Jeff Pooley) to a recent paper in the same journal by economists Gerald Faulhaber, Hal Singer and Augustus Urschel. That paper has become especially influential after the Federal Communication Commission’s Chairman Ajit Pai repeatedly called on its “independent” evidence to justify his plan to [ ]
Two rulings by the CRTC the other day constitute a significant win for common carriage (aka ‘net neutrality’), competition, Canadians and cultural policy. The second of the two rulings found that Videotron’s Unlimited Music program runs afoul of Canada’s telecoms law. It does so by giving an undue preference to subscribers of the company’s highest [ ]
Today I participated in a panel debate at the Manning Centre s annual conference. It s a big conflab that attracts a whose who list of the Conservative Party and party faithful. The question we debated was, Is it time to pull the plug on the CBC? I debated the question with James Baxter from iPolitics and [ ]