Thanks for having me here. My name is Steve Anderson. I'm the co-founder and national coordinator of OpenMedia.ca. I also write a monthly syndicated column called “Media Links”, about media, culture, and technology.
OpenMedia.ca is a national, non-partisan, non-profit organization and public interest network working to advance and support an open and innovative communications system in Canada. OpenMedia represents a growing network of independent media and civil society groups.
Some of you may also know me from SaveOurNet.ca, a project of OpenMedia.ca. SaveOurNet is a broad-based coalition of citizens and over 115 businesses and public interest groups working to protect the Internet's level playing field or “net neutrality”.
I think the timing for this meeting couldn't be better. The media and culture industries are transforming before our eyes. It's an exciting time to reimagine our media ecology in Canada. I believe it's a unique moment in history.
Last fall, the CRTC developed new traffic management guidelines. However, under these new guidelines, the CRTC will not enforce its own framework. Instead, the onus falls on the consumer to file a complaint and prove that an ISP is unjustly throttling their Internet connection.
It is unfair to force consumers to somehow obtain the technical and policy expertise to make their case effectively before the CRTC. To truly have an open Internet, either we'll need the CRTC to be mandated to conduct regular traffic management compliance audits, or we'll need a net neutrality law.
While we wait for that, the use of BitTorrent, one of the most radically democratic enablers of grassroots cultural production, is being systematically stifled by ISPs. I'm thrilled to see that the Canada Media Fund is planning to support experimental media, but I think it's odd to fund experimental media and at the same time allow ISPs to prevent media makers from using a key distribution tool like BitTorrent. This was a point made well at the CRTC's traffic management hearings by creator groups like ACTRA and the CFTPA.
As someone who was previously an independent video producer, I relied on BitTorrent for my own media production. This is what motivated me to get involved in this issue. In the early days of YouTube, I produced a mini-documentary. I was armed with no formal education in video production, and had no resources, but I was able to use free software and the open Internet--BitTorrent specifically--to produce and distribute my video.
That video has now been viewed over one million times online and broadcast on satellite and cable TV in the U.S. The same video also kicked off my professional video production career.
The reason I'm telling you all of this is that I really want to hammer home the point that the open Internet is the best training ground for professional cultural production. Any limit on BitTorrent is a limit on free expression and cultural production, and letting ISPs limit our access to such online services is indeed a slippery slope. There's a question that I think we need to ask ourselves: is it worth the risk?
Consider for a moment all of the great open Internet Canadian success stories we could lose. Michael Geist and others who have come before you have mentioned some of the exciting success stories in music, software, book publishing, and video production, so I won't get into all those, but I will mention some, including some new ones.
The NFB's screening room is a huge success, obviously, with 1,500 pieces of video and 3.7 million online film views in the first year. Now, imagine if they lost the ability to distribute these videos.
The CBC is hugely successful with digital media as well. CBC Radio 3 is a boon for independent musicians, operating like a MySpace for Canadian music culture.
The CBC is responsible for two of the most exciting digital video experiments in Canada: Zed TV and Exposure. Zed functioned much like a multi-platform Canadian YouTube, before YouTube existed.
Another Canadian media success story is The Tyee, an online independent news website in B.C. It is the recipient of top journalism prizes in Canada and the U.S. The Tyee has launched several innovative crowd-source initiatives, including its “Green Your Campbell Cash” website, which allows people to post their ideas and initiatives for tackling climate change through collective spending and action.
Another important success story is Rabble.ca, which is a national independent multimedia news organization that has been exploring innovative participatory journalism projects using social media. One of its initiatives, called “You Ask”, invites participants to drive video interviews with newsmakers by posing questions in real time through its online chat feature.
It's important to remember that most of these independent projects are past the start-up mode now. While they have been successful, they struggle for survival. I think it's important to acknowledge that these projects wouldn't be around without the open Internet, and that needs to be safeguarded. But it's also important to figure out ways to financially support independent media and cultural creators in Canada.
I know that Heritage Canada is currently exploring how to bring something like the Canada Magazine Fund to online publications. This is a great idea.
In the Netherlands, which is a good example of how this could work, non-profit media associations receive government funding in proportion to their membership numbers. It's a very hands-off, independent source of funding for cultural creators. I'm hoping that Heritage Canada will come up with something similar and support online media in relation to membership numbers, using some kind of needs-based formula.
The Canada Media Fund is also currently undergoing a consultation process with industry to define its priorities. But from what I've heard, much of the independent media world isn't being invited to contribute to this process, which is a shame.
Big media outlets like CTV, CanWest, and Rogers, on the other hand, have guaranteed envelopes of millions of dollars. I'm wondering why a Media Fund dedicated to innovation and a leveling of the playing field provides guaranteed envelopes of cash to old media empires.
Furthermore, I'm wondering why neither the public nor media innovators have really been consulted in that process. We're talking about something like $130 million of actual tax dollars here. The Canada Media Fund would best fulfill its mandate if it focused on independent and public media rather than private broadcasters.
I'd like to reiterate what Jeff Anders, from The Mark, told you when he was here:
It's the very small organizations, the ones that are really high risk, that are figuring things out. Helping those companies and organizations is really the place where we need to focus our efforts.
I couldn't agree more with those sentiments.
In a similar vein, another great way to support culture in a digital environment would be to liberate the community media trust to local media innovation centres. Until now, cable companies have been using this public trust, which is collected through a cable levy, for their own commercial interests.
As most of you probably know, right now this is the subject of a CRTC public hearing that I'll be testifying before later this week. At stake is $100 million dollars a year collected through a cable levy for community expression. If the CRTC rules in favour of liberating the funds, it may not directly support professional Canadian cultural production, but creating local platforms for media innovation and citizen cultural production will invigorate the sector from the ground up. And there won't be any additional cost to the government or taxpayers, because it's already being collected. It's just being misused at the moment.
In terms of broader priorities, such as access to digital media, all roads point to the need for a national digital strategy. In recent years, Canada has gone from being a leader in Internet technology and adoption to being an Internet laggard. We have fallen behind many European and Asian countries in terms of Internet access, speed, and cost, causing Canada to drop from second to tenth place among the 30 OECD countries.
A recent Harvard study makes the situation yet more salient, concluding, and I quote: “Canada continues to see itself as a high performer in broadband, as it was early in the decade, but current benchmarks suggest that this is no longer a realistic picture of its comparative performance on several relevant measures”.
Canada badly needs a national broadband plan that ensures universal high-speed Internet access, and I think the broadband plan will need to be part of a made-in-Canada digital strategy, one that takes the best from what other countries are doing and adds to it our unique talents. A centre point of that digital strategy should be open access. If you ask any of the experts in networking technology.... Yochai Benkler from Harvard was just up here, and he said that open access is what produces a competitive landscape and what will bring costs down for Internet access.
As I'm sure you all know, Tony Clement recently announced a national consultation on Canada's digital economy strategy, which I think is a great first step. The policies that come out of that consultation should address issues like these: broadband access; Internet openness, or Internet neutrality; open access rules; support for Canadian culture, media, and telecommunications ownership; and mobile Internet costs competition openness.
These are the issues at the top of Canadians' checklist in terms of digital strategy. All of these areas have been subject to policy neglect and we'll need to ensure that the consultation captures the imagination, creativity, and ingenuity of people from across Canada. I'm talking about face-to-face meetings rather than simply taking online responses to pre-selected questions.
I should also say going into this consultation that it's been revealed that there has been basically a year of telecommunications government meetings with clients and Stephen Harper, and that makes me nervous about how this is being set up. I think this should be a citizen-driven process, not an industry-driven process.