I'll start with probably what was a bit of a catalyst for a lot of this. About a year ago, when mobile television came up, broadcasters were a bit shocked to find that in fact it would be outside, that the CRTC would take a hands-off approach to that, essentially.
I think there probably needs to be some very creative thinking, that the CRTC take a bit more risk in how they can actually support the tenets of the act in terms of the mechanisms that support the production and distribution of Canadian programming. I can't tell you specifically how one would do that. I think that it's a question that has to be raised.
In their 1999 new media exemption decision, they essentially said they would come back and review this as things went on. They really haven't done that. The Lincoln report asked them to do so. There probably just hasn't been time or the resources for them to do that. I think it's probably time for them to open that up to the public and to get a full range of thinking about this.
I suspect that there will be broad areas where any regulatory body will be unable to act to regulate content, because as quickly as they figure out ways to ensure that there are some content levels supporting Canadian content on a new piece of technology, there will be another one popping up.
One of the things that I think we've seen around the world is that other countries have started to deal with this. What has become clearer and clearer is that in fact there is a policy instrument that goes beyond content regulation, which is for producing local content, and that is the public broadcaster. So in fact—and I would agree with Monsieur Bensimon—it's actually that there is a whole range of agencies that need to be coordinated.
I'm a little wary of the notion of taking chunks of CBC money and putting them in things like the CTF, given what we've seen in the last few months of the unwillingness of certain parties in the broadcasting and telecommunications sector to actually buy into that, and they want to take their marbles and go home.
My point would be that what you see around the world—specifically with the BBC as the model—where you want to see experimentation, where you want to see local content, you use the resources of the public broadcaster to do that so that there is a choice. You offer a choice of content to Canadians.
There is a lot of mashing up. Among the students we talked to, Facebook is kind of a bricolage. I create my persona, I create my own media persona by whether I have Will Ferrell clips on my site or whether I have something from the CBC archives.