Thank you.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for asking us to appear.
I'm Timothy Denton, and I'm chairman of the Internet Society Canada Chapter. Its membership consists largely of former regulators and senior public servants, Ph.D. candidates in communications and professors, together with others interested in communications policy from a pro-Internet perspective. Every branch of the Internet Society is independent of every other one, and all rely on voluntary efforts.
My background is in telecommunications and broadcasting law. I'm a lawyer by training and I have a master's degree in law and communications from the University of Ottawa. I worked at the CRTC in the late 1970s and later I was policy adviser to the minister of communications in the period when we developed the Broadcasting Act of 1991.
Possibly more important, I've also been on the board of the American Registry for Internet Numbers and the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, as well as participating in various bodies that form part of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which is known as ICANN.
I found that, by listening carefully to the engineers and technologists, I learned a great deal about how the Internet works and what its basic features are. I served as a national commissioner of the CRTC under chairmanships of Konrad von Finckenstein and Jean-Pierre Blais from 2009 to 2013.
One of the strangest experiences I had was to come back to the CRTC after a gap of 30 years to find that the mentality had not changed since I'd been there in 1979. The Internet was still referred to as “new media” despite the fact that the Internet had taken shape in 1974. People would go home to watch Netflix but the phenomenon they were watching had no bearing on their jobs. It was as if by casting a magic spell over the Internet by calling it “new media” they could capture it for Canadian broadcasting regulation. In fact, this is the essence of our critique of the new Bill C-11.
There is a fatal ambiguity at work in Bill C-11. It is spoken about as if it were an act to modernize broadcasting law. If that were so, then the act could work by subsidizing Canadian TV productions out of streaming revenues. Various speakers before you, such as Peter Menzies and Michael Geist, have spoken to this effect.
It is the contention of the Internet Society Canada Chapter that the ambitions of government as expressed in this bill are much wider.
The language of Bill C-11 has so defined the word “program” to include any moving images or sounds or sounds and moving images. It has so defined the CRTC's regulatory authority that it covers anything that might engender revenues directly or indirectly. The chairman of the CRTC observed recently that the bill would give the commission authority to regulate user-generated content.
Broadcasting is a form of communication that requires government licensing or regulation. The Broadcasting Act contains very severe penalties for broadcasting without a licence. The act lays out hundreds of thousands' and millions of dollars' worth of fines. Bill C-11 maintains this in its entirety.
By contrast, think about writing, speaking or printing. You do not need a government licence to pick up the phone and talk, nor to write an email. The regulation of speech takes place after one has spoken, not before. Unique to the 20th century, broadcasting reintroduced the idea of the need for prior government permission to be able to communicate using specific technologies. This made sense when broadcasters used airwaves with early radio technology. When very few spoke to millions, there was strong argument for regulation of broadcast speech.
Make no mistake. This bill as written is about speech controls when talking using audio or audiovisual means across the Internet. Indeed, by the expansion of this logic in Bill C-11, the government might just as well define email and talking on the phone as broadcasting.
BillC-11 could be better retitled from online streaming to an act for the regulation of communications across the Internet. It would be a more honest and accurate title.
Thank you. I await your questions.