Login
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) last week said it will require online streaming services that offer podcasts or other broadcasting content in Canada to register with the government by Nov. 28, Public News reported.
The law applies only to those services making $10 million or more in annual revenue in Canada and the information it is requiring for registration is minimal, the CRTC said. Services must provide the Canadian government with their legal name and contact information, along with “information related to their content and subscribership.”
“You will be able to continue to listen to and watch the content of your choice, the CRTC states on its website. “Our goal is to better support Canadian and Indigenous content. We have always respected Canadians’ right to freedom of expression.”
But critics of the new rule, like University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, said:
“From a speech perspective, the regulator is effectively saying that a podcaster or news outlet that generates a certain threshold of revenue must register with the government, a position that runs counter to freedom of expression rights without government interference.”
“The takeaway from the decision is obvious: registration is the first step toward regulation, with the Commission already envisioning the prospect of regulating a wide range of services,” Geist wrote, adding that such regulation will likely include podcasts, news sites and other online audio and video services.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald voiced concern this past weekend in a tweet that went viral:
The Canadian government, armed with one of the world’s most repressive online censorship schemes, announces that all “online streaming services that offer podcasts” must formally register with the government to permit regulatory controls:https://t.co/wHOloLgnY2 pic.twitter.com/6noTYceVsg
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 1, 2023
Public News also wrote the new rule, which extends to “individuals that host podcasts on their own websites,” meaning that:
“It will be harder to express yourself online, and digital-first outlets will be disproportionately negatively impacted. Traditional outlets will be economically reliant on the feds, and their lobby groups are already mobilizing to push the federal government for more support — so much for independent journalism.”
By increasing federal funding to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and setting the groundwork to regulate independent news providers, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his colleagues “are actively using disinformation to censor their fellow citizens in the name of stopping disinformation,” according to Public News. “They are pioneering dangerous tactics that other Western nations could pick up.”
This new order is being implemented under the purview of Canada’s C-11 law, also known as the Digital Streaming Act, passed in April by Parliament to amend the Broadcasting Act.
Advocates for the law insist it is not meant to allow for censorship of online political content. But critics caution the law, along with the registration order issued last week, is setting up a framework to do precisely that.
Greenwald underscored on Monday’s episode of his show, “System Update,” that the law must be understood within the context of:
“the very flagrant pro-censorship climate in Canada, which has repeatedly supported all sorts of legal limitations on hate speech and disinformation, as well as the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of the Trudeau government, which waged extrajudicial war on peaceful truckers who were protesting COVID mandates, including seizing their bank accounts with no due process.”
New law comes amid global crackdown on independent media and free speech
The Canadian crackdown on independent media comes amid a growing number of practices, rules and laws instituted by private and governmental actors globally that affect free speech.
New laws passed in Australia, the U.K. and the European Union also are making it easier for governments to mandate censorship on tech platforms, in the name of online safety and protecting children.
Kim Iversen and Greenwald both reported that in the U.K., Big Tech platforms and the government have launched an attack against the streaming platform Rumble, using recent allegations against comedian and political commentator Russell Brand as a pretense.
They are making threats under the purview of the new British Online Safety Bill, passed earlier this month, which empowers the British government and state officials to force internet companies to censor information on their sites.
Last week, European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova claimed that X/Twitter was the biggest source of misinformation and demanded greater censorship across a number of platforms, Public noted. “Ahead of upcoming elections, Google, TikTok, Microsoft, and Meta also have more to do to tackle disinformation,” she said.
Her statements were made in the context of a new EU law — the Digital Services Act — meant to implement “sweeping” changes that will force social media giants to implement “new policies and practices” to address accusations they “host corrosive content,” The New York Times reported.
“If the measure is successful, as officials and experts hope, its effects could extend far beyond Europe, changing company policies in the United States and elsewhere,” it noted.
In other words, the U.S. federal or state governments could not constitutionally enact a similar law that forces companies to crack down on “hate speech, disinformation and other harmful and illegal material on their sites.”
However, policies by tech firms in the U.S. can be changed by forcing companies to change their practices in response to Canadian, European and other laws.
WEF and UN create ‘Global Coalition for Digital Safety’
At the same time that these new rules and laws are taking effect, the United Nations (U.N.) and the World Economic Forum (WEF) have partnered to develop precisely the types of policies and practices that would allow Big Tech platforms and governments to comply with such regulations and establish “global digital safety.”
“The WEF is seeking to regulate Big Tech companies directly, and has captured Big Tech,” Public News wrote.
The U.N. and the WEF are co-sponsoring an event next week at the U.N. Internet Governance Forum to share the “collaborative strategies” they are developing as part of the Global Coalition for Digital Safety launched at the WEF’s January meeting in Davos.
Many of the organizations involved in the coalition play or will play a direct role in the censorship established in these new laws.
The purpose of the coalition is to:
“accelerate public-private cooperation to tackle harmful content online and will serve to exchange best practices for new online safety regulation, take coordinated action to reduce the risk of online harms, and drive forward collaboration on programs to enhance digital media literacy.”
Speakers on this week’s panel include representatives from Google, Microsoft, the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership — a coalition of the biggest tech companies, including Microsoft and Google Meta, Zoom, TikTok, Linkedin and others — along with Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, leading “the world’s first government regulatory agency committed to keeping its citizens safer online.”
Other members of the coalition primarily come from Big Tech but also include representatives from the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and Ofcom, the U.K. communications regulator.
Ofcom, for example, will be the entity responsible for regulating online digital content, when the U.K.’s Digital Safety Law comes into effect.
Although not formally a participant in the coalition, Trudeau is a long-time active participant in the WEF as well.
The group also includes Global Partners Digital, another private organization dedicated to stopping disinformation that is funded by the same governments — Canadian, U.S., Australian, Irish, U.K., for example — and Big Tech firms — Google and Meta — that are already part of the coalition or are implementing the draconian new laws.
The coalition has produced a series of documents that create a vague set of tools for creating “online safety.”
First, it launched its “Global Principles for Digital Safety” at the WEF’s 2023 meeting in Davos — ideals that promise to “prevent abuse and exploitation” and respond to “online harms.”
In that document, the WEF proposes, as do many of the laws and regulations currently being put in place, that these are essential for the highest purpose of creating a “safe online environment for our citizens,” namely children.
It has also created a “risk assessment” methodology and a “typology of online harms” that is meant “to enable global multi stakeholder cooperation.”
And it is creating a “toolkit” for tech, policy and design interventions to stop these “harms.”
Critics continue to sound the alarm about these emerging collaborations.
Such collaborations were nearly unthinkable just a few years ago, Greenwald said, but now public discourse is dominated by “this new theory that the government and outside experts are qualified and competent to identify disinformation, even though these are the same people who lie constantly.”
“They are now demanding the power to determine what is true and false,” he added.
Brand called the emerging censorship landscape “terrifying,” particularly “the possibility that reality itself is going to be controlled and curated by the interests of a Big Tech monopoly and the interests of the state, [which] are forming more and more opportunities for collaboration.”
