The Online Streaming Act has long cast a dark shadow over Canadian culture and lobby groups are praying that it stays that way.
With Canada’s Online Streaming Act in place, a dark shadow has long loomed over Canadian culture – specifically culture that exists online. Whether that is premium creators with deals with companies like Netflix or Amazon or digital first creators on places like TikTok or YouTube, creators have been left in a sort of “brace for impact” mode for the last two years.
The reason why this law is so awful, as our analysis shows, is that the law would intervene in the marketplace of ideas, hijack the algorithms, and order platforms to pick the winners and losers of the Canadian governments choosing. In other words, it regulates user generated content. Lobbyists and the mainstream media spent years lying their collective asses off to deny this, but the text is clear that this is precisely what the law does. After a while, even former CRTC chair, Ian Scott, was eventually forced to admit that it regulates user generated content, and also admit that yes, the Online Streaming Act manipulates algorithms.
While it may be obvious now, back then, people like myself were faced with a firehose of disinformation being blasted at us at a constant rate. Things even went so far that politicians even called for Trump style politically motivated “investigations” for daring to question the, at the time, legislation. Nevertheless, people like us stood firm and stood firm on our facts without wavering.
More recently, the law finds itself facing court challenges on certain aspects. It also is undergoing an extensive hearing at the CRTC. During senate hearings, the CRTC insisted that regulating the internet was no big deal and that they didn’t really even need to hire anyone else to perform the job. For them, implementing the Online Streaming Act was little more than a formality. Then reality sank in and they were forced to clear their schedule not once, but twice in their desperate effort to try and implement the Online Streaming Act as quickly as possible. If you are wondering why the impact of the Online Streaming Act hasn’t been felt yet, well, this is why.
Still, the future for Canadian online creators were quite uncertain. As we noted clear back in 2021, Canadian creators faced the prospect of getting downranked in results in favour of government certified speech. This is because government certified speech in determining what is and is not “Canadian content”, or “Cancon”, is an extremely lengthy and messy process. It forces Canadians to jump through numerous hoops to get their content certified – a process that can take months or even years. Just being Canadian is nowhere near enough to get certified. This certification process is obviously incompatible with the fast paced environment that is the online world and would effectively leave Canadian creators out in the cold. If you think all of this is bad, at one point, the CRTC even went so far as to suggest that the forcefeeding of “Canadian content” onto users should be seen globally, not just for Canadian users.
There is little doubt that the Online Streaming Act is a horrible law and rescinding it can’t happen soon enough. For Canadian creators, there is hope on the horizon, though. There is mounting pressure from the United States to scrap this bad law. This pressure has been happening for years through numerous warnings and letters, but it seems that things are getting close to coming to a head. Already, that pressure has resulted in the merciful scrapping of the Digital Services Tax – a move that was followed up by an announcement that Canadians would be refunded once this bad law is finally reaching the dustbin of history. Still, the Online News Act and the Online Streaming Act is still getting targeted.
Hilariously enough, lobbyists are currently freaking out that all of their hard work to kill off their online competition and censor independent creators might be slipping through their fingers. From the National Observer:
Cultural and broadcast industry groups are calling on the Liberal government to support the Online Streaming Act and the Online News Act, as the Prime Minister’s Office refuses to say whether the bills are part of trade negotiations with the United States.
“We are aware that the US is exerting pressure on the [federal government], and the cultural sector is undoubtedly on high alert,” said Marie-Julie Desrochers, executive director of a coalition representing the cultural sector.
Kevin Desjardins, president of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, which has supported both pieces of legislation, said his group is concerned when it hears the threats.
Both Desrochers and Desjardins are hopeful the government will keep the bills in place, as the Liberals stay mum on their intentions — a marked departure to the Trudeau government’s attitude toward the bills.
Desrochers said in an email her group, the Coalition for the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, is “confident” Carney will safeguard the Online Streaming Act. In July, the coalition sent Carney a letter, signed by dozens of groups in the arts and cultural sector, saying that Canadian culture “must remain untouchable in the current negotiations.”
Desjardins said in the conversations with government, “they’ve remained strongly supportive, especially of measures to support Canadian newsrooms, and we’re continuing to encourage them to stand firm on these measures.”
The broadcasters’ group respects “the government isn’t going to engage in negotiations with the US, which have been very difficult to this point, in public and in the media,” he said.
But Desjardins cautioned that “if the Canadian government were to cave on this, we think that you would see station closures and newsrooms being profoundly affected by it.”
… and you thought I was exaggerating when I say these organizations were lying their collective asses off. It’s still ongoing. To counteract that obvious disinformation, the Online News Act has resulted in numerous closures and layoffs to news rooms. Yes, they are hoping that news organizations are going to benefit from the Online Streaming Act by stealing from Canadian creators over top of killing off their audiences which is one of the many reason why the Canadian government is being sued over this.
As I’ve said for years now, the easy part for the government was passing these obviously unconstitutional bills. Surviving the inevitable court challenges and trade retaliation? Well, that was going to be a much taller order given that it’s generally much more difficult to pass off obvious bullshit as “common sense” to a judge than it is an obviously heavily lobbied politician.
Still, the fact that there is a major push to rescind this and the Online News Act is great news for Canadians. The Online News Act has been responsible for a lot of destruction in the news sector and the Online Streaming Act was inching closer to destroying the lives of Canadian creators. Lobbyists who worked so hard to push for these destructive laws are now sweating profusely over this and it is delicious watching these corrupt assholes squirm for a change.
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.
Discover more from Freezenet.ca
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Or simply amend to exempt ANY and ALL Canadian user generated content. But any prospect of law outright being scrapped is preferable.
Yeah, exempting all user generated content was what every non-lobbyist was screaming for since the early days when this was still known as Bill C-10, but the government repeatedly said “no”. They made up some obvious BS excuse at one point by saying that if they exempted user generated content, then all content would be exempt, so including user generated content was required. No one in their right mind would accept that given that there are plenty of ways the government could classify user generated content and codify it that way, but they flatly refused even to do that. So, here we are with this awful law in the books.
Like you, though, I’d prefer it to be scrapped completely.