It seems Quebec is trying their hand at trying to ruin the internet. This by wanting to impose French language quotas on social media.
Throughout the Online Streaming Act debate, I’ve repeatedly noted that the Canadian government has made a fatal mistake when it comes to the fundamental thinking of the internet. That is believing that the internet in general is no different than regulating broadcast television. As a result, according to the government, you can simply apply broadcast regulation to the internet and move on from there.
Many experts have pointed out the obvious fact that the internet is not like broadcast television. A number of people have directly pointed out things like how the internet is on demand whereas television has limited time slots on the broadcast hours. Television is centralized whereas the internet is most decidedly not. You really could go on. Sadly, the governments general response was basically “fuck logic and reason, we’re doing it anyway”. So, after throwing out all evidence out the window, they passed the Online News Act in direct defiance to all common sense and reason.
To be clear, creators never wanted this. As predicted by experts, there is ongoing litigation to put a stop to this madness. It is also on the receiving end of trade retaliation from the United States – again, as experts have long predicted. The only people who are on board with this is the mainstream media who went so far as to proclaim that a level playing field is not enough. That’s the level of insanity that we are continuing to deal with to this day as the law goes through the CRTC regulatory process – something that has been subject to numerous delays already as the regulator finally realizes what an absolute clusterfuck they were handed from the federal government.
All of this could have been avoided. Whether it was listening to experts, examining the evidence, or even getting half a clue on how the internet works, there were so many opportunities to stop everything and realize that this whole thing was a really bad idea. Nope. Politicians shouted to the rooftops that their god given right to be idiots shall not be infringed much to the facepalming of Canadians.
Sadly, it’s not just the federal government that is trying to pretend that the internet is no different than traditional broadcast television. Quebec is also seemingly making this very same fatal mistake as well. The province is trying to impose language laws on social media to enforce language quotas. I know, I’m wondering how that would even work myself. From Michael Geist:
Incredibly, the government, led on the file by Minister of Culture and Communications Mathieu Lacombe, has managed to make an awful bill even worse. During the clause-by-clause review, it approved several changes that establish a virtually unlimited regulatory scope. For example, the original Bill 109 covered:
every digital platform that offers a service for viewing audiovisual content online or listening to music, audio books or podcasts online or that provides access to such a service offered by a third-party platform as well as every digital platform that offers services enabling access to online cultural content determined by government regulation.
Just in case something might still fall through the cracks, the government has amended this provision by replacing “audio books or podcasts online” to “or other audio content.”. In other words, it wants to ensure that any service offering audio or video in whatever digital form now or in the distant future is subject to regulation with French language quotas.
Further, Bill 109’s previous exception for social media has now been removed. The Bill originally stated at Section 3 that “this Act does not apply to social media and digital platforms whose main purpose is to offer Indigenous content.” It also featured a definition for social media as a “digital platform whose main purpose is to allow users to share content and interact with that content and other users.” During clause-by-clause, the government removed the reference to social media in the Section 3 exemption and deleted the social media definition altogether. Lacombe told the committee that it isn’t currently his intent to regulate social media users but that the Quebec government wants to leave open the door to potential regulation if services offer audio or video services. It goes without saying that many social media services already do.
What kind of regulation does the government have in mind?
In addition to registration requirements, the government is establishing discoverability requirements that feature two components: minimum French language content quotas and efforts to make that content easier to discover. The specific percentage for language content quotas would be established by regulation. Lacombe made it clear that both are essential aspects of discoverability: it needs to be easier to discover French language content and there needs to be a minimum percentage of French language content to find.
Geist rightfully notes that this sort of regulatory framework opens the door to the possibility of platforms exiting the Quebec market. If it was possible that the platforms could exit the Canadian market over the insanity of the Online Streaming Act, then it would be substantially more possible that they would simply block Quebec IP addresses over the also insane language quota demands. After all, Quebec has an even smaller population than the entirety of Canada and platforms are already challenging the Online Streaming Act.
I mean, on what planet does this sort of regulatory thinking even work in any practical sense? Are platforms supposed to tell English creators that the platforms are closed because there’s not enough French content? It goes without saying that platforms already surface French language content for people who speak French. That has been obvious for years now. It makes no sense to surface French content for people who both don’t understand the language and have no interest in learning the language or culture. So, the algorithms are already doing such things.
I’m with Geist on this one. This law is entirely unworkable and the only outcome here is that this is going to backfire in some way on the Quebec government.
In Quebec “culture” seems to have a sacred level. You can’t say anything against it. Life forbid that you qualify it as industry and be treated like any other industry.
“We” also seem to have a narrow view of what’s “culture”. The video game industry (could be also seen as culture) is + or – 2x the value of movies and music, combined! And yet it seems to be snubbed at. And in turn (to be a bit provocative) , the xxx industry (that also can be seen as culture) is + or – 1.5 x the value of the video game industry, and yet, it also is snubbed at.
Lastly, there’s something to be thought when you’re incapable and/or incompetent of using one of the greatest inventions (internet) that has a worldwide reach (I mean, the ENTIRE planet is your client) without having to erect barriers, demand fees, install force/compelled speech and contort it.
It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? I know the CBC is constantly running that stupid “choose noise” ads that basically says everything on the internet is terrible and everything on TV is so peachy and awesome. There’s not a lot of examples that make it more apparent that the media views the internet as a threat that must be stamped out as opposed to something that can be utilized. The push for the Online Streaming Act is definitely an example of the blatantly unconstitutional efforts to compel speech as well. That alone is enough to get me ranting for an hour over the stupidity of it all.
I think part of the video games getting snubbed as an acceptable form of culture has to do with mainstream media pushing hard to pretend that time has not moved at all since the 80s. Every so often, I see a mention of Pac Man and Space Invaders and broadcast media types suddenly gush over the nostalgia. Otherwise, the media pretends gaming doesn’t exist even as its massive size eclipses other industries completely as you’ve said.
I actually saw the other week a couple of news hosts talking about movies and music from the 80s. It was weird because some of them didn’t even look old enough to remember such things. Then, part way through the conversation, after looking all dreamy and nostalgic for the 80s and 70s, one by one, they started admitting that they weren’t even born yet, so they don’t personally have memories of that sort of thing. They continue to go shoulder to the wheel to appease the Boomer generation while pretty much giving anyone younger than that the middle finger for the most part. I look at the demographics of this whole thing and seriously don’t get it. There’s no long term thinking about all of this. Give it another 30 years and gushing over the 70s is just going to alienate the audience because they never lived through that. You’d think that maybe the executives should be looking into what younger people are in to and talking about that with the same kind of excitement as 70s culture, but I haven’t seen anything like that yet.
Still, I think the snubbing of gaming is partly because broadcasters believe that Boomers do the whole shaking fist thing at the whole concept. So, they are trying to take advantage of that and basically validate those negative feelings.
To be fair, though, modern gaming is having its problems lately with the gambling aspects (re: loot boxes and battle passes). That isn’t really helping matters by any means.