Bill C-10 doesn’t rein in web giants

I don’t agree with Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault on much — certainly not his proposed amendments to our Broadcasting Act in Bill C-10. But there’s one thing we do agree on: Big tech companies have too much power and our federal government should help fix it.

For the past year, Guilbeault has been promoting his approach to “taking on web giants,” promising “recess is over” for them. If only it were.

Rather than “taking on” web giants, the minister’s proposals seek to deputize and co-opt web giants for his own governmenm’s means. Instead of simply taxing companies for funds to support Canadian art and news production, his poorly conceived funding schemes actually make our cultural industries even more dependent on the continued growth and success of these companies.

And this is all compounded by new expansive powers for a conga line of government regulators, including a greatly expanded CRTC and a new dedicated “online harms” regulator. Our guarantee these sweeping powers will be used responsibly and effectively? Variations of “just trust us.”

Although Bill C-10 was tabled back in the fall, it only stoked widespread public controversy a few weeks ago when the government astonished observers by removing a crucial exemption for usergenerated audiovisual content. This means all of the pictures, video and audio we upload to internet platforms would now be subject to regulation by the CRTC.

Since then, Guilbeault has faced growing public criticism and handled it with little grace. The government is now backtracking with further amendments to the bill, narrowing the CRTC’s jurisdiction over our user-generated content to only treating it like broadcasting if we’re lucky enough our content’s popular and focusing on “discoverability” — hiding content our feeds would otherwise display to showcase CRTC-defined “Canadian” content.

But the core problem with Bill C-10 hasn’t changed: User audiovisual speech on platforms remains subject to CRTC regulation, a huge leap in government authority over an increasingly central area of our online expression.

None of this takes on web giants, as Guilbeault claims. It’s simply giving the government, CRTC, and Big Tech even more power over what we can do and see online. And such strict regulations and requirements ensure only the largest platforms can afford to comply — guaranteeing their continued dominance.

Let’s take a moment to talk about what taking on web giants would look like.

First, many feel the largest platforms have gathered excessive power in our society. Yet even for those of us who hate them, platforms can be difficult to leave, with opting out carrying serious personal and professional costs.

More people are arguing that the walled gardens of platforms give them quasi-monopolistic power over large portions of the internet. So why aren’t we updating our Competition Act to evaluate and take action to limit that power? That’s what competition law is for.

Second, the government needs to seriously update our privacy laws. We need substantial privacy protections, including meaningful user consent and bans on the sale of our user data by third party brokers who market surveillance data about us. Unfortunately, the government’s current privacy reform proposals bend over backwards to leave plenty of big tech-sized loopholes, leaving our data as vulnerable as ever.

Third, what about the invisible, manipulative algorithms of big tech? This government just wants to use them. But they could instead require them to be more transparent to regulators and the public.

Most of all, they could mandate user empowerment in shaping these algorithms, giving us the transparency and tools to decide what we want our personal online experiences to look like.

But if you’re hoping for any of these citizen-empowering solutions from Guilbeault, don’t hold your breath. He’s made his position clear: his only focus is supporting the legacy media industries, to shape the internet in cable TV’s image at any cost. If that means giving future Canadian governments of any political stripe a blank cheque to regulate our online speech through new directives to the CRTC, that seems to be a price he’s willing to have us pay.