Bill C-10 would require YouTube, other platforms to recommend Canadian content | Hacker News Reader

Bill C-10 would require YouTube, other platforms to recommend Canadian content

theglobeandmail.com

45 pointsthrowawaysea75 comments

There's an episode of [0] The Ongoing History of New Music, Episode 702: A Brief(ish) History of CanCon, where they cover the [1] Broadcasting Act of Canada, which says TV & Radio need to be a certain % "Canadian". In general (at least from this and other things I've heard) CanCon was a big win for Canadian artists.

[0] https://www.ajournalofmusicalthings.com/ongoing-history-new-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content

Bad for consumers. Great for major Canadian labels. It does little for indie music. When Bieber, Drake start being played every hour I'm not sure anyone really wins.

When it first came out it helped expose some new music. What it became was another tool to feed the machine.

I think that's ultimately where it backfired. Back when it was introduced it made sense, a way to keep American media and culture from completely drowning out our own. But now that most stations are required to have 40% of their content Canadian, you end up with loops of Bieber, Drake, Rush, BNL, or the Hip getting played every 20-25 minutes. It honestly gets tiring hearing "Courage" or "Tom Sawyer" played 3-4 times during my 8-hour shift, every single day.

That was also the situation in the late-90s when I was listening to the radio all day in Toronto. I would argue that it actually hurt the development of the Canadian music scene in many respects because it made everything so top heavy. You were either the Hip, BNL, or OLP or you weren't on the radio. A select few bands reaped all of the benefits. Ironically, these bands would have found success without the MAPL system, but with it they were incredibly over-exposed in Canadian markets. The scene was also quite stagnant because even a "New Rock" station like the Edge would play the same set of Canadian songs for years at a time.

Chickity China, the Chinese chicken

You have a drumstick and your brain stops tickin'

Watching X-Files with no lights on

We're dans la maison

I hope the Smoking Man's in this one

Like Harrison Ford, I'm getting frantic

Like Sting, I'm tantric

Like Snickers, guaranteed to satisfy

Like Kurosawa, I make mad films, 'kay, I don't make films

But if I did they'd have a Samurai

Gonna get a set of better clubs

Gonna find the kind with tiny nubs

Just so my irons aren't always flying off the back-swing

Gotta get in tune with Sailor Moon

'Cause that cartoon has got the boom anime babes

That make me think the wrong thing

All of which is to say, without CanCon do we really think this would encapsulate the late 90's experience in Canada?

It's even worse on TV. Stuff like Stargate SG-1, a show set in the U.S, geared towards a U.S audience, is about secret U.S Air Force operations is considered Canadian content because it has Canadian writers, actors and is filmed in B.C for financial reasons. The whole point was to encourage "Canadian Culture".

If the Canadian government wants to support Canadian artists, just pay them. Don't force other people to pay.

They could just make art that people want to buy.

Yeah but that would involve a line item in the budget, whereas this is stealthily hidden in the cost of media subscriptions.

I'm still not sure why there is a need to set a quota for content. Or for the state to subsidize it.

Entertainment is a hugely profitable business. Disney and Marvel for instance made billions of dollars of profits year after year for almost a decade. They did it by making content that people want to watch.

Why not simply... make content that people want to watch?

Canadian here. This isn't about subsidizing content, this is about censoring content that the Canadian government deems to be "not in the Canadian spirit". This is about treating anyone with a larger audience (youtube, insta, etc) as a broadcaster and making them follow strict government rules.

That explains why this law was introduced, but not the general policy of requiring canadian content exists.

America has a really outsized impact on western culture and has previously leveraged that (through DoD partnerships and public funding) to reinforce its view of what western culture should be like. I think it's reasonable for a country that could easily be eclipsed by the culture of their southern neighbors to make some effort to fund the preservation of things that differentiate it. The Canadian government tends to be pretty bullish on supporting cultural festivals (hence JFL Montreal being a world-wide event) and supporting independent creators through CanCon laws is just another limb of that strategy.

As another Canadian I believe this is a pretty strong miscategorization of the bill, this bill is extending the practice of CanCon to online platforms that would, from given comments, require various algorithmic recommendation tools to highlight content that the CRTC marks as being Canadian.

There are some concerns around censorship here (that the Canadian government may decline to mark videos highlighting controversial topics as being Canadian) but it'll honestly just shift those videos out of this preferred requirement.

Most services currently offer some regional and language preferences so this doesn't seem like a huge technical requirement but it is quite possible it'll hurt smaller platforms disproportionately more than larger ones - most regulation, even very warranted stuff, tends to increase the barrier to market entry.

I think this is a pretty fair way to approach trying to supplement the economy and retain more productivity within the country as we're trying to pay off the debts we've racked up during covid, it'll help boost the take home of artists and independent creators without leaving a large line item supporting the arts for the CPC to cut if they regain a majority. But that's totally just my opinion.

How is this fair at all? It's not fair to consumers whose prevailing choices are regulatorily subverted. It's not fair to media producers who are now penalized for not being Canadian, nor is it fair for media platforms who now have to invent some special process for Canadian users. By what definition is it fair to force foreigners to fund your own nationalist political goals? Why should anyone care that the current Canadian government supposedly can't even muster enough democratic support to enact and maintain a lasting budget item to sponsor its own agenda?

Canada is the market that it is - it's your decision as a business to voluntarily enter that market and the GDPR has shown that regional policies like these can be sanely implemented. As someone who can see the problems this country is trying to fight through during the pandemic, I think it's reasonable to reinvest in our economy and this will, essentially, work out sort of like a tariff. It's likely the cost of consuming these services will slightly rise but in exchange we should see more money staying domestic.

And hey, politics is hard.

As an example of domestic prioritization, Canada prepaid for a whole lot of vaccines (enough for everyone to be vaccinated three times over - so six shots) but when push came to shove the US horded their supply to inoculate citizens first. I think it was a grave error for the government to turn to the private market to purchase those doses instead of investing in expanding domestic vaccine production back in April 2020 but I can't really hold it against America for ensuring the safety of their domestic population first - it's not like you're doing anything overtly malignant like marking up the prices per dose or refusing to release the vaccine globally unless folks sign on to unbalanced trade deals.

Canada controls and provides the Canadian consumer market - we value supporting local content and want to make sure our artists are able to make a living because, honestly, we really value the arts up here - whether they're the group of seven or putting together tutorials on how to make a DIY rocket in your backyard on youtube.

> As an example of domestic prioritization, Canada prepaid for a whole lot of vaccines (enough for everyone to be vaccinated three times over - so six shots) but when push came to shove the US horded their supply to inoculate citizens first.

There was no "hoarding" or "export ban"; The Trump Administration was simply smart and bought the doses when potential vaccines were still early in development, long before FDA approval. Manufacturers are simply fulfilling their contractual obligations to ship the dose to the first investors.

Canada could have done the same, giving more money to promising tech earlier, to get the doses earlier. Instead, Trudeau spent 44 million dollars [0] gave months [1] of work to CCP controlled CanSino vaccine. It, unsurprisingly, failed spectacularly.

> we value supporting local content and want to make sure our artists are able to make a living because, honestly, we really value the arts up here

Then why are special laws required at all if people really want that content and are interested in buying it? There's no special laws that says that people MUST by iPhones, they simply do because they like the product.

[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/7302194/canada-coronavirus-vaccin...

[1] https://ipolitics.ca/2021/03/12/a-waste-of-a-lot-of-time-res...

Then enact a tariff. This is simply a dishonest tariff that tries to bury and hide costs. It's a tariff that you know opposition parties will have no trouble mustering democratic support in killing if it was made plain. "Politics is hard" because it turns out when you sell a tariff as something other than a tariff, it's easier to pass! Who would have thought? I should have added another sentence to my original comment: it's not fair to citizens whose democratic choice is being subverted through deliberate misrepresentation to protect an unpopular agenda.

The US has a grant for the arts, it's called the National Endowment for the Arts. Didn't need to misrepresent it to their citizens to keep it for more than 50 years. Sounds like if you really valued the arts in Canada you'd have no trouble getting your government to fund the arts too.

But sure, perhaps Canada's bad position in vaccine supply justifies unfairly penalizing foreign media. When I grew up, I learnt in school that one wrong justifies another.

But why even bother arguing about fairness. After all, "Canada is the market that it is - it's your decision as a business to voluntarily enter that market", so anything Canada does is justified.

For the same reason that people are (allegedly) concerned about the tyranny of the majority, or about how everything they buy is made in China.

Why not make local, better media?

For the same reason that Wal-Mart is full of cheap foreign imports, instead of domestic products.

This largely comes down to anti-competitive practices and relative economic output. Canada has a far weaker economy than the US - we've honestly just got a lot fewer people up here - and the US can leverage it's geopolitical power to force other countries to abide by it's laws.

If we don't blink when an unequal trade treaty opens up natural resources to private american exploitation we probably shouldn't blink when a country establishes a law that favors it's domestic product over imported.

And actually, I believe the US does dump a significant amount of money into both enforcing the "Made in America" mark on products and advertising to buy American - that too is trying to tip the balance toward consumption of a domestic product. And, lastly, unlike in America, in Canada the free market is not held as the solution to all problems - going out of your way to support and help fellow Canadians is a virtue that's widely celebrated.

I feel like this bill makes more sense if you look at it from a geopolitical standpoint instead of an economic standpoint.

Economies of scale dictate that, yes, Disney and Marvel can make billions of dollars of profits year after year. And they can absolutely out-spend Canadian companies, coming from a market with 10x the number of consumers.

For comparison, you can look at Quebec. While France has a larger population than Quebec, the difference is smaller, and the cultural difference is larger, and so they punch above their weight against the rest of Canada when it comes to media because they have a drive to consume local content that isn't found elsewhere.

And so this bill is an attempt to (artificially) bootstrap that same culture in the other 75% of Canada.

> Economies of scale dictate that, yes, Disney and Marvel can make billions of dollars of profits year after year. And they can absolutely out-spend Canadian companies, coming from a market with 10x the number of consumers.

If it's just about the money then why did Parasites do so well globally? Canadians are free to sell their content in the US after all.

> And so this bill is an attempt to (artificially) bootstrap that same culture in the other 75% of Canada.

Why are folks from the 75% not interested in it? Seems they would rather buy American.

Culture snow balls. The American media perpetuates their culture through network effects. Without support our voices drowns out.

>Disney and Marvel for instance made billions of dollars of profits year after year for almost a decade.

For a US company.

Canada has long had laws making sure content in Canadian isn't drown out by external cultures and to keep some business at home. It's not exactly a complicated motivation, nor is "just out-compete the entire planet" a reasonable suggestion for that goal.

Because despite many local cultures producing market inferior cultural products, those cultures nonetheless do not wish to die.

How do you get a countries' culture not overwhelmed and wiped out by a foreign one when your frontier is right beside the world's biggest producer of content?

If we give up, all those small productions will never find a way to flourish, or even become a giant themselves.

> How do you get a countries' culture not overwhelmed and wiped out by a foreign one when your frontier is right beside the world's biggest producer of content?

From talking to Canadians, they pride themselves with being a multicultural society. "Protecting the nation against foreign cultures" doesn't sound very multicultural to me...

Protecting yourself from a monoculture is protecting multiculturalism.

I don't really think this is true. I'm an American and most of my Youtube channels I'm subscribed are from foreign countries, and this isn't something I've actively tried and do.

I think availability of diverse content is important. You need varying views of every situation and often times there is a bias that originates or caters to the country of origin.

American cinema is pretty bad about this too, almost every American movie based on a historical event or military engagement paints America in a favorable light and completely omits the efforts and cooperation of our allies.

If you only watched American entertainment you would come out of it thinking they are the only country fighting for the world.

Clickbait title, there is nothing in the proposed legislation that forces platforms to do anything. It just gives the CRTC jurisdiction over the online platforms. The real application will be debated in court and hearings.

The current law is really outdated anyway and needs reform, there is not question about that. In Quebec, the proposed legislation has been well received in general.

At the end of the day even if it was the case that youtube must push a bit more Canadian content, would that be a bad thing per say?

I think this is a bandaid solution. If the government wants to promote Canadian content, they can find more Canadian content. Make more / better content that is worth watching.

They are pursuing a tariff-style approach here, as they do on other platforms, whereas you're recommending a subsidy-style approach.

It's worth remembering that Canada is generally more tariff-oriented in trade protection than their neighbors to the South.

> Make more / better content that is worth watching

Or how about sovereign nations push back against the tidal wave of simplistic US cultural propaganda and limit it?

What are sovereign democratic nations if not the people who make them up and voluntarily choose to consume what you call "simplistic US cultural propaganda"?

Or in other words: who the hell do you think you are to force other people to listen to what you want?

> would that be a bad thing per say?

Not in my opinion. In many European countries there's legislation when it comes to radio broadcasting or TV to play a certain amount of local content because international platforms have the habit of siphoning a lot of money out of local cultural production otherwise. It helps promote diversity in the arts. Particularly important for smaller countries who would go under when having to compete with the clickbait algorithms that are powered by hundreds of millions of largely English-speaking users.

Independent of the political or legal questions being discussed in other threads, I feel like I should point out that YouTube ALREADY does this.

I get recommendations for CBC news, and other Canadian news channels and other Canadian content. Most of it is not notable because it's already part of my cultural experience of "Normal", but perhaps an American would look at it and think it was quaint. I do notice the opposite when i go to America and find TV commercials ridiculously over the top.

A few years ago, I moved to a small European country for a couple of years where I didn't speak the language, and just by the nature of my Geolocation (and home country settings in my Google account), my YouTube recommendations were rife with content specific for that country.

Either the EU already has this regulation in place, or YouTube believes that local recommendations are useful for engagement. For me personally, it was a mixed bag. It was interesting to see what the Algorithm thought the locals would enjoy, and it was somewhat culturally immersive. But it also ultimately was not interesting to my (decidedly North American) sensibilities.

When I moved back to Canada, I was relieved to see my recommendations default to a North American focus.

This same bill will also regulate user generated content, since an exclusion clause that was in it previously was removed. Per a Canadian law professor (https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2021/04/freedom-of-expression-un...):

> This is a remarkable and dangerous step in an already bad piece of legislation. The government believes that it should regulate all user generated content, leaving it to regulator to determine on what terms and conditions will be attached the videos of millions of Canadians on sites like Youtube, Instagram, TikTok, and hundreds of other services. The Department of Justice’s own Charter analysis of the bill specifically cites the exclusion to argue that it does not unduly encroach on freedom of expression rights. Without the exclusion, Bill C-10 adopts the position that a regulator sets the rules for free speech online. As Emily Laidlaw tweeted, human rights apply online and offline.

Torontonian here.

Micheal Geist, the Canadian digital rights lawyer, has been giving a barnstormer of a performance on Twitter about why C-10 is bad law poorly written.

It is a handout bill written by the content industry lobby to restrict internet freedoms.

As someone firmly in the “internet” camp I oppose it.

As mc32 said, "It's their country and their rules."

That said, requiring YouTube to recommend Canadian content doesn't make sense to me. The rationale for Canadian content requirements for TV is that it's cheaper for CTV and Global to pay for preexisting American shows than to create their own, so there has to be some incentive for them to do so.

YouTube isn't like that. There, a Canadian who makes videos on underwater basket weaving is on exactly the same level as an American who makes videos on the same topic; it's not like an American media conglomerate already dominates the niche.

(Radio is more akin to YouTube than TV, in the sense that a garage band trying to get big has the same difficult route whether starting from Mississauga or Mississippi, which is why Canadian content mandate for that medium has always been less sensible and more unpopular than for TV; thus "beaver hours", until that was prohibited.)

I don't want "recommendations", whether Canadian or otherwise. I would rather decide myself which one I want. (I don't use YouTube, but it is not specific to YouTube. Still, that isn't the government's job to decide what someone else recommends; the government can recommend things but shouldn't force others to recommend or not recommend certain stuff.)

If the government wants to promote Canadian content they can find them and put them on their television channel, and then say that there are no (or lesser) taxes for watching this television channel, so that people who are interested can watch it.

The government should not control internet messages; that is up to the sender/receiver.

Such Canadian content rules should only apply to the CBC, in my opinion, not to others who are independent from the CBC.

There's like, a ton of really popular Canadian YouTube channels so it seems weird to call them out specifically. Other platforms I can understand.

If you want identifiably Canadian content, you can’t go wrong with Bob & Doug McKenzie.

This kind of laws can turn out to be useful if they prompt google to make recommendation algorithm customizable in order to say "we are not recommending anything, users are choosing for themselves".

https://archive.is/CwVUb

It's their country and their rules. If local broadcast has to play by them, so should internet TV. It's also good so they preserve whatever distinctness they have from "global" culture and retain and promote their own.

In some sense I agree but in another, as a user, I don't want Canadian stuff to be recommended to me because it's Canadian. I want content to succeed by merit alone at least when it comes to the internet. Do I care that some YouTuber is a Canadian? Not really.

I think it would be nice if we could search media content by country of origin. I'm a US citizen living in Canada, and I anecdotally feel that YouTube recommends lots of Canadian content, but not nearly as high a percentage as the broadcasters are required to do.

> If local broadcast has to play by them, so should internet TV.

That would make sense if it was anything like broadcast TV where users have no control and its public airwaves.

Instead this is a private website where users decide what to watch. This isn’t meaningfully different from requiring people to suggest Canadian content when chatting with each other online.

This bill doesn't actually interfere with sought content - it is more concerned with algorithms related to surfacing new content. No video is going to be banned or forced on people, but if you leave YouTube on autoplay you'll hit a lot more Canadian creators.

At least, that is the intent.

Canadian here. While I support these initiatives in general, 40% is way excessive. Given that Canada is 10x smaller than US, 20% would be a nice handicap. Execution, as others pointed out, is a bit sloppy too. I would prefer to listen to lesser known and varied Canadian artists, like Faouzia or Coeur de Pirate, but no! - let’s roll out the same Drake, Bieber, and Weeknd over and over again.

I am surprised to see the “their country their rules” sentiment here. Why doesn’t the HN crowd offer the same reprieve to developing nations like China or India, when they try to regulate social media, retain their culture/identity/politics, and defend against the immense influence of American culture/media/activism? What makes the two different? I find this Canadian bill to be pretty egregious because it will subject user submitted media to CRTC content guidelines. That could just as easily mean, for example, preventing speech on controversial topics like gender identity unless they align with the current (left biased) ruling government’s perspective.

I think the difference is that this isn't being used as a tool of political suppression the way that China tries to control various tech companies. Instead it's just as valid to argue that forcing Canadians to accept 100% freely chosen content is an American value that the US is trying to force on us.

I don't mean to say that 40% is definitely the right ratio - but what societal factors are most free are going to differ from country to country. The US enthusiastically embraces the free-market as the salve for all ills - elsewhere government intervention is viewed as being more free and responsible since it can shield residents from the levels undue economic hardship that can strike Americans when it comes to trying to pay medical bills.

What is most free is not a definite objective thing, and I would note that this bill is only targeting how companies need to operate within Canada while the US has a plethora of laws dictating how companies need to act across the world in order to participate in the US market.

What are your thoughts on the fact that this bill may give the controlling government authority on what content is allowed and what gets prominently featured? Can this not be a used to amplify certain ideologies while suppressing others? Whatever the stated intent is, I would argue the law should not permit any encroachment on something as fundamental as free speech. It seems former members of the CRTC do see this bill as enabling an attack on free speech (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-former-crtc...).

At least you can oust a government. What can you do if YT wants to send you garbage to watch or starts sending you ideological content or start skewing content to whatever advances their POV?

That’s a different line of argument but I suppose it is valid. I certainly don’t feel good about huge multinational corporations originating from Silicon Valley shaping information (and as a result, culture and politics) across the entire planet.

The bill will allow the government to nominate what content will be more likely to come up in recommended content - it doesn't empower them at all to specifically ban content in any manner they can't today.

As for that power - it can lead to bias but I'm pretty alright with it, it's likely going to be used to both stifle the organic spread of false information (i.e. anti-vax, flat earthers etc...) and it'll also likely be used to favor content that's supportive of the current administration (so if Harper got back into power it'd likely not include pro-climate change content). I think this is a pretty acceptable trade off when it comes to stumble-upon content - but all the content not endorsed by the system wouldn't be banned or removed.

The biggest downsides for me are the possible difficulty adhering to the guidelines for smaller platforms. I enjoy nebula and it's possible if unlikely that they may be forced to exit the market as a result of this bill - but bear in mind that any inherently Canadian content creators should be able to easily argue their adherence to the guidelines even if the CRTC tries to shut them down.

Sounds like a waste of time considering it won't pass the first amendment test.

In which country does the first amendment apply?

Stop being pedantic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_2_of_the_Canadian_Char...

Edit because I'm apparently only allowed like 5 comments a day: Refusing to spend 30 seconds to find out that "yes, there is a roughly equivalent right to free speech in Canada" is just lazy, if you didn't know that, or pedantic if you did. Which would you rather be?

Pushing back against "the first amendment" being a shorthand for "freedom of expression" in a Global context is not being pedantic.

Especially interesting in a thread where the people bringing this up as a violation of freedom of expression are advocating for a border-free internet without local oversight or government control over content.

Do you want an international decentralized internet or do you want a defacto US culture internet?

This might be a particularly sensitive topic for Canadians right now as there's a lot of extremely negative culture leak up from the states including anti-mask/vax protestors that repeat conservative US talking points. It's extremely common to see people toting "Masks are against the 1st Amendment" up here so I imagine a fair amount of the pedantry you're perceiving here is actually just misdirected frustration over false information spreading through fringe groups we have to deal with.

I didn't search for the Charter, not because of laziness, but because I'm an american immigrant to Canada and I'm familiar with both the Charter and the Constitution, and a chunk of case law surrounding both. Americans thinking that their Constitution will protect them up here is an extremely common misconception, and for example, a witness who says "I plead the fifth" will get laughed out of court (and perhaps into jail).

I would submit that pedantry is the very basis of law, and happily accept that label in this context. But "that's a law in a different country" is hardly a minor detail.

All of them, since it restrains Congress wherever its actions might apply.

> it won't pass the first amendment test.

I do not think it applies.

These Canadian Content rules have already been in place for a long time. This is about applying them to online providers the way they’re already applied to broadcasters. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content

Specifically - the CanCon rules don't actually restrict the broadcast of any specific speech just requiring a different mixture than what you might desire (i.e. Rush).

Additionally it's important to note that the CCRF is not the US Bill of Rights and both has some inherent textual differences along with significantly different interpretation over the years. Free speech in Canada is both more and less free than in the US in some pretty interesting ways.

Sure it restricts specific speech - speech deemed to not meet Canadian content requirements.

And I’d love to hear an example of how free speech in Canada is “more free” than in the US.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27148801.

Feeling eh-deprived.

"There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first postnational state."

~Justin Trudeau [1]

Mr. Trudeau sure likes having it both ways, fancying himself a postnational while influencing people in Canada to watch more Canadian media. He has also been the driving force between keeping the US/Canada border closed during the pandemic for better or for worse, making his trade policy effectively more nationalistic than Trumps in practice. He's a postnationalist in name only and in reality he's a proud anti-nativist nationalist. His Liberal party also has connections to the "Century Initative" [2] which imagines a Canada population 100 million by 2100. This population will presumably be safely protected from the foreign pandemic and watching wholesome Canadian Content.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/magazine/trudeaus-canada-...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative

> He has also been the driving force between keeping the US/Canada border closed during the pandemic for better or for worse

The US should be more concerned with the re-opening of the border, considering the current complete vaccination rate of 35% vs 3% in Canada.

> making his trade policy effectively more nationalistic than Trumps in practice

Doesn't seem nationalistic at all. Remember the C-Series plane?

Trudeau did absolutely nothing for the industry and immediately bowed down to Trump after he slapped tariffs later judged to be illegal. Well, not exactly, there was whining and a vague threat to switch an order of fighter jets from Boeing to Lockheed. Couldn't inject a little bit of capital at the right time. Airbus swooped in and bought the whole thing at a heavy discount.

Engineering shipped to France and manufacturing to Alabama.

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