The pure nonsense talking point that streamers must pay news organizations free money is back at the CRTC thanks to the CAB.
One of the things I’ve long pointed out is the fact that because the Online Streaming Act (formerly Bill C-11) was passed in the last government, it can continue on with the legislative process regardless of an election. This is because it is now law. Thanks to that, the absurd nonsense from lobbyists are free to continue on away from the realm of politics and into the closed doors of the overseeing regulator (this being the CRTC).
Lobbyists pushing for this legislation has long been divorced from any kind of reality or common sense. The main thrust of their argument generally boils down to “our organizations are making less money, streamers are making money, therefore streamers are stealing from us and we are owed big time.” Any sensible person would look at that and say, “uh, no. Not how any of this works.” It’s basically the equivalent of saying “well, the car manufacturers are making lots of money right now, but our buggy whip manufacturers are making less money. Therefore, the automobile manufacturers have stolen the money that rightfully belongs to us. That means they owe us billions of dollars.” That is effectively what they are saying here.
Just because a legacy business is making less money doesn’t necessarily mean that their money is automatically being “stolen” somehow. It means, at most, that people have moved on from legacy media players and have moved to a new player in the entertainment and news space. That’s how society advances and continues to improve upon itself. In fact, most sensible people would argue that this is actually something that should be encouraged since it encourages innovations. In fact, this is a rather normal thing for society to do.
The counter-argument, from these lobbyists perspective, is that they are entitled to an audience and entitled to making a certain amount of revenues no matter what. The fact that someone other than them is making money these days is untoward (and even downright illegal according to some of these lunatics). As a result of audiences freely choosing someone other than them for their source of news and entertainment, they feel that they have been illegally harmed and are owed millions because their product is inferior to their own offerings. Thanks to this, the tech companies now owe millions (or even billions) to them because they can’t compete against someone who chose to act as though the internet revolution actually happened.
It goes without saying that the level of entitlement for these corporate hacks is off the charts. The ask is completely asinine because they are demanding that their companies be propped up by the government now that fewer and fewer people are wanting to consume their product. They want to be completely untethered from the realities of the marketplace so they can continue to push a product no one wants. After all, attracting an audience for multi-million dollar companies is oh so hard and they’d rather not have to bother trying to attract those audiences in the first place. Instead, they want a world where they get free money forever to produce their crappy products no one wants.
One such lobbyist organization pushing for things like this is the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB). About three years ago, Kevin Desjarins of the CAB was before the Canadian senate incessantly whining about how unfair life is for broadcasters. Despite operating in a country with a system specifically designed to coddle them at almost every step of the way, they claimed that the evil bad “Big Tech” companies are basically stealing from them. Here was a part of our summary of one such remarks:
Desjardins then pivoted and said that he is profoundly disappointed that at a moment when big streamers are skimming money from the Canadian system that they should be focused on making a fair and equitable system. He says he is disappointed that the discussion is about maintaining Canadian broadcasters as that backstop. He said that the independent broadcasting sector grew in the decade leading up to COVID-19. Now independent producers are bigger than them and they are all facing foreign streamers that are bigger than everyone. He says he doesn’t understand why energy is being placed in the aforementioned amendment.
Yeah, it’s no exaggeration that this guy is that batshit insane. He really thinks that large platforms like YouTube are ripping Canada off and stealing from them directly. This despite the reality of how many Canadian jobs platforms like TikTok and Youtube have created for Canadians who were frequently otherwise rejected by the very system that has propped up the legacy media companies. The platforms gave creative people opportunities that would otherwise not be afforded to them and Desjardins had the audacity to accuse the platforms of being the thieves in all of this.
Of course, this wasn’t the only bill people like Desjardins were lobbying for. Desjardins were also pushing the Online News Act (formerly Bill C-18. Otherwise known as Canada’s link tax which failed in spectacular fashion). The flaws were obvious, but you know who was also on the wrong side of history? None other than CAB through Desjardins. Here’s a summary of some of his opening remarks (my responses in brackets) during that bills senate hearings:
Kevin Desjardins of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters opened with his statement. He said that his organization supports Bill C-18 for two essential reasons: the legislation is necessary (it is not) and it is fair (it is not). So why is this legislation needed? (it is not) When he speaks to his members, be it small, medium or large players (emphasis on the large, no doubt) in small or large markets, the issues they face are the same. Advertising revenues are severely challenged, the cost of programming continues to rise as do their copyright and regulatory options, and the fixed costs of running their businesses are also rising. Maintaining professional news rooms across the country is a fundamental commitment to Canada’s broadcasters. Last year, Canada’s private broadcasters invested $681 million in news and community information. Sustaining those news rooms depends largely on entertaining programming that draws the largest audiences and the greatest ad revenues.
Over the past decade, Desjardins said, foreign online platforms aggressively cornered the market in search and advertising. Using their dominant positions, they have dramatically affected the advertising market through algorithmic exploitation of user data. As a result, foreign digital platforms take more than two thirds of those ad revenues out of the Canadian economy (there’s the fake “their stealing our money” argument). In a short time (10 years is a short time???) we have effectively developed a trade deficit in Canada’s advertising market.
At the same time, Desjardins continued, these platforms are exploiting Canadian news online content to deepen their competitive advantages in advertising (this is a lie). Search and social platforms may help to direct audiences to online news sites (this is true), but contrary to their statements here and the other place, these are not free links. In reality, Google and Facebook retain most of their user interactions with news sites with their ability to gather, aggregate, and resell user data to advertisers (this is an apples and oranges comparison. We’re talking about two completely different things here). Nevertheless, social and search platforms provide no compensation to news sites for the value they derive for those interactions (and the shouldn’t because this is links provided by the publishers we are talking about).
Yeah, this is a guy and an organization that truly lives in an alternate universe completely divorced from reality. It’s the kind of poisonous lies and disinformation I had to put up with throughout 2022 and 2023. The member organizations reflected this nonsense through their members via Big Lie 1.0 and Big Lie 2.0. Naturally, Freezenet spent a great deal of time and effort trying to combat such disinformation and intentional lies about how technology works.
If all of this doesn’t sound greedy enough for this particular lobby group, in late 2023, the same organization was demanding even more after getting what they wanted on the legislative side of things. They argued, among other things, that 4% of all search revenues should be diverted to news organizations? Why? Because they said so. After all, only they are allowed to make money in the first place. If someone else is making money, well, that just shouldn’t be allowed and they should be the ones getting money from it. The comments proved that the greed these organizations have show no limits.
So, fast forward to today and whose dumb face shows up in the media? Desjardins on behalf of the CAB. Desjardins was before the CRTC arguing that streaming revenues should be funnelled to the organizations members – specifically legacy news organizations? Why? Because money made by the streamers was actually their money all along in the first place. Therefore, the streaming companies should be giving them free money. I’m not even joking here. From CARTT:
Foreign streamers should be made to put money toward Canadian news funds because they are drawing money that used to go to support it out of the system, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) argued on the first day of the CRTC’s hearing on the definition of Canadian content in the audio-visual space Wednesday.
“What the foreign streamers have been able to do is to come in and … take revenues out of Canada,” Kevin Desjardins, president of the trade group that represents the big private broadcasters, told the five-member CRTC panel about the advertising and subscriber revenues that the private broadcasters, struggling with the cord cutting phenomenon, have lost.
“Those were the sorts of things that helped to ensure that news was one of the pieces that could get produced. So again, whether if they are doing news themselves, I think that by and large Canadians probably would not put a level of trust and confidence in news that was produced by a foreign entity, but at the same time, they are taking some of the resources out of the system that help to support news.
“And on that level, that is the rationale for them having to put money back into news.”
The lunacy here is staggering. There’s are reasons why cord cutting is such a huge phenomenon. This includes the constant rise in costs to subscribe to traditional television, the frequently low quality that is on offer (often, traditional broadcasters are rebroadcasting American programming such as the endless number of CSI shows and low quality reality TV). This as the cost of living continues to skyrocket out of control (and threatens to continue to be harder on non-boomer generations as the price shocks on basic necessities are set to experience massive price shocks thanks to the insane tariffs coming from the US. When consumers are increasingly stretched thin, you can’t expect them to just pay for the biggest premium packaging for traditional news outlets across the board.
Of course, none of those economic realities matters to these idiots. Instead, it’s ‘platforms come into Canada. Platforms make money. Therefore, platforms are stealing from us.’ As far as they are concerned, everyone is making a million dollars a year, lives in medium sized mansions, drives six figure priced cars, and is enjoying life from the Horne of Plenty. So, clearly, the only problem here is the existence of streaming companies because all of their economic woes are all their fault and no one elses.
All of this, of course, isn’t even getting into how you square the round streaming peg into the news round hole. At what point is Netflix part of the local news ecosystem? It is not. Is Google producing sports news reports on YouTube? Not that I’m aware of. Is Amazon also producing weather reports in the form of a weatherman standing in front of a map of the area? It would be news to me if they were. None of these streaming platforms that are being targeted are producing news content. So, how on earth does one draw the conclusion that the streaming companies somehow owe news companies money in the first place? It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
The problem, however, is the fact that this is the CRTC. As I’ve long argued, the CRTC is the Canadian poster child of regulatory capture. If the legacy lobbying organizations says “jump”, the CRTC says “how high” on a vast majority of issues.
A good case in point here is the notorious example of CRTC intervention last year. Specifically, the lobbyists argued that screenshots of news articles counts as “news content” and demanded that Meta start forking over money immediately. The lobbyists made these demands to the government, the government forwarded their demands to the CRTC, and the CRTC responded by issuing these dumbass demands to Meta. As should be obvious to all involved, the Online News Act makes no reference to screenshots. Screenshots were not part of any of the debates, nor is it to be found anywhere in the legislation. What it ultimately was is the lobbyists trying to completely re-interpret the legislation and fabricate provisions in the legislation to say that Meta is violating the law. Everyone should’ve known this, but no one batted an eye. Instead, they just basically concluded, “welp, if the lobbying organization says it, then it must be true” and carried out their marching orders. Nothing really came from that whole stupid affair as far as I know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if lawyers from Meta responded by basically telling the CRTC to read their own damned law first before coming after them for complete nonsense reasons.
So, in all likelihood, these comments will be treated as gospel at the CRTC no matter how completely and utterly insane such statements are. After all, it is well known how often the board at the CRTC has members coming and going from the boardrooms of the legacy media companies and telecom giants in the first place. Already, those pushing for some forms of sanity are facing an uphill battle with the fact that the disaster that is the Online Streaming Act is now law. There’s no repealing it at the CRTC level. It’s just a debate on how the CRTC intends on implementing this law. The fact that legacy media companies will likely have huge sway compared to people like Canadian creators only further stacks the deck in the legacy media companies favour. The Canadian creators that actually produce a chunk of that wealth that is being generated in the first place? I can only suspect that they’ll all get left holding the bag at the end of the day.
(Via @PagMenzies)
