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The lecture was based on the World Heritage Convention, which designates and compels participatory nations to protect World Heritage Sites. In the past, the World Heritage Committee would confront the national government, who would in turn contact the regional government (provincial) who would in turn contact the municipality who would contact the corporation who was infringing upon the environmental integrity of a World Heritage Site through its extractive activities. Now, we’re seeing that the WHC and similar regimes are bypassing governments completely and are heading straight to the corporation.
That relationship between regimes and corporations is also being built without the expressed support of national governments. For example, even though some nations had never ratified Kyoto, or refused to deliver on their commitments, corporations or other non-state actors are moving ahead with commitments to those regimes, and taking action.
There is obviously a danger for the Canadian government of becoming marginalized in these conversations as it seems to be clinging to this false division between private action and international engagement, a notion that government should be the broker through which all must pass. In other words, there is a need to recognize that one can no longer look at treaty compliance, implementation and effectiveness through a state-centric hierarchical lens and instead need to recognize that today’s relationships are shifting to a matrix-based model. CRTC seems to obviously be one of these groups that understand this shift, and is a perfect example of how one can re-inforce the irrelevance of one's role. Instead, goverments should be trying to figure out, concretely, what their value is in this matrix, and be proactive in solidifying their role within it.
(sorry, that was a long comment...)
What's more shocking than the hearings is the submissions by groups that clearly have little idea what's going on. We may assume that the CRTC has a built-in bias towards more regulation, and control a lot about how all of this goes by setting the agenda of who gets to intervene in high-profile slots.... but nevertheless, they *could* still surprise us and come up with a reasonable (non-regulating) proposal.
The orgs intervening? Though this stuff affects their very lives as organizations - not to member their members as individuals - seem to have done very little in the way of a real investigation of what this means to them and how, absent government regulation, they could adapt and thrive. So before we have any decision from the regulator, we have an indictment of the "creative class" in Canada. Sad.
Even though I struggle with these questions, one thing I clearly see is that the crtc just isn't getting it at all. Before outside-the-box thinking can be applied, one needs to recognize that there is, in fact, a box and what that box looks like even in loose terms and the crtc is clearly missing this here.
The premise is that they want to help foster Canadian content through this fund. The wrong way to go about it would be to funnel the money back into the standard media producers to help them create web content that most Canadians would ignore, similar to TV productions that are aired to satisfy Can-Con requirements and draw dismal ratings.
Is there a right way? Eventually one came to mind. Use the fund to help distant communities to get connected with the rest of the Internet world. You'd give Canadians in those communities opportunities they've never had before, expanding the number of Canadians online, and thus enabling them to create content in the modern sense of word. Indirectly, you would be satisfying your initial mandate of generating more Canadian content on the web, as well as "plugging in" a whole new segment of Canadians otherwise left out of the loop.
I agree that we should not be propping up these entities from the broadcast era. This is very similar to the way big telecom companies are trying to make the Internet more like the past mediums that had more control over. They are in a similar sense, trying to impose a TV model on content distribution on the Internet.
The CRTC doesn't think anyone is "drown[ing] in a sea of online video from around the world"; that's a characterization of the interveners of what the interveners that have appeared before it have been saying, Except that that characterization is wrong, too -- said interveners have been saying that, as with a number of other industries (forestry, auto, pharma, whatever), Canadian creators of scripted audiovisual content don't have the economies of scale to compete with U.S. producers who can afford to waste literally millions in failed pilots and scripts and so forth. Aall the blogs, videos, podcasts made by ordinary Canadians that are sharing Canadian stories over the web are great, except that the CRTC has said in very explicit and in no uncertain terms, over and over again, that has no interest in getting involved with user-generated content -- that stuff is doing just fine on its own -- its interest is in reviewing evidence with respect to production of the kinds of things that actors act in, directors direct, scriptwriters write, and so on. Which is a tiny corner of the Intertubez, but is the only corner the CRTC is really looking at -- and is one whose production costs don't change much as a result of the Internet.
Instead a public servant somewhere in Ottawa will determine what is “Canadian” not so we can promote Canadians stories, but so that we can prop the old and dying business model of broadcast media - the expensive production facilities, the hierarchies of managers and staffers that are necessary to produce older media like television. What evidence do you have that ppl don't want to watch scripted audiovisual content? All the actually-existing evidence -- more film consumption, Hulu traffic growing leaps and bounds, an increasing proportion of Youtube's growth coming from stuff produced by people who spent serious time and money it -- points in the opposite direction. If a fund is created -- what you need to understand is that that is the proposal of interveners before the CRTC, not of the CRTC itself -- then it will likely be administered in the way the Canadian Television Fund and Telefilm are. You're right that this money doesn't go to those who would create the content anyway and don't need help doing it. But why the heck should we pay for that? If something is to be funded, it should go to artists and creators doing stuff that the marketplace wouldn't support and free time is not enough to accomplish. I do understand the free-market model you're advocating -- unlike the auto or forestry or solar-power sectors, cultural production needs to be unsubsidized and make it or break it according to the rules of dollar bills -- but that does not mean I agree with it.
We don’t need a government agency that defines what is “Canadian culture.” Indeed. But you're struggling mightily against a straw man here: we do not have one. The CRTC has never attempted to define Canadian culture, just required that gatekeepers (radio and TV stations) reserve some of their airtime for culture created by Canadians. All the scare stories in the papers aside, it's not going to do that where there are no gatekeepers (open Internet access). Cell phones, Xbox 360, and other locked hardware devices whose programming decisions are made by gatekeepers, well, we'll have to see.