Well the solution would be.... Again, this is not simply my opinion, but I've met over the years with many people in the broadcast and ISP industry. As you know, I'm the chairman of The Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund and I know many of those people on a personal level. The sense I have is that, just as the cable industry when it started refused to pay any royalties for broadcast television for about 25 years and were sued continually and said “No we don't touch the content, we're just selling bandwidth”, that's the same argument the ISPs use today. Once the thing was getting to the Supreme Court and it looked like there would be some government legislation that could compel them to do it, they basically said they were in the wrong business, they wanted to be in the content business. They wanted to pay a dollar and charge two dollars. Since then we all get all of our television content, not from broadcasters, not from television producers, but only from cable and satellite companies who make a lot of money.
Those same companies own many of the ISPs, and they are not blind to the fact that if they agreed in an industrial sense to pay for this content, they could eat the lunch of the Apples and the other folks who are positioning themselves to be the content suppliers. And they have a great line with subscribers who already pay them a monthly fee. So the issue has been—not only in my view but in the view of many—that the political situation has been very unfavourable in the United States, Canada, and many other countries for imposing what a consumer might see as some sort of tax, a content tax or something, on the ISP level. So governments are loath to weigh in. Absent that, I believe that a long time ago there would have been some sort of copyright legislation that would have made the ISPs liable. Everybody would pay five bucks a month more for the fee and the whole thing would be different.
Where is it going? I believe the time is right, or almost right, for those ISPs to make a deal, either through government compelling them or simply because it's good business sense for them. At some point what might be the way—this is one way to do it—is for government to simply say that it believes that content should be paid for and that it will give the ISPs a period of time to come up with a non-governmental solution. Let the private sector work it out, and if they don't do it within a certain period of time, the government would look at potential legislation or something like that.
That's even a longer answer than, perhaps, I was allowed, but that was as short as I could make it.