Under criminal law, there's a very substantial body of law and practice and procedure for specifically how to involve the courts, and involve them for a very good reason, because fundamental human rights are involved in searches, invasion of privacy, search and seizure or arresting someone. We're talking about very serious issues. There's a huge body of law that makes it very easy for a judge.... Well, “very easy” is too simple, but specific, defined criteria make it much more straightforward for a judge to rule yea or nay.
In the current context, we are talking much more about either policy issues or technical issues, as opposed to legal issues. The courts do not have that kind of expertise. They do not have a staff of engineers, like my colleague here, who can advise them on these issues. We are talking about new issues. We are talking about activities that the court is not used to dealing with.
For instance, the Minister of Industry is currently the spectrum regulator. They administer the Radiocommunication Act. This includes authorizing all wireless services within Canada for use, managing 150,000 spectrum licences and 35,000 different entities across Canada. That's just the spectrum management piece, and that's under the minister's authority, but ISED is fundamentally supporting that work.
We're talking about something much more similar when we're talking about the provisions of Bill C-8. We're talking about technical management of network infrastructure. Here, there are going to be a whole bunch of novel issues for a court. They're going to be non-legal issues in most cases, and the court will not have the expertise to deal with them. Maybe as a basis of comparison, the Goldtv case before the Federal Court in 2019 might give an indication. That had some novel issues. It was a copyright infringement case that involved a network management site-blocking issue. It was uncontested by the site that was being blocked, but it still took five months for the court to come to a decision.
That was over copyright infringement, which is much more well defined. Injunctions around copyright infringement are a more common activity before the court, but this is going to be much more novel, much more far-ranging and much more outside the court's normal remit.