The Future of TV and the CRTC

UPDATE: Once again, someone from CBC read this entry. I'm a marked woman, I tells ya. Seriously, though, it's good to see someone at Grandmother's Corpse is monitoring Canadian public opinion of their operation. So, next time you drop by, why don't you leave a comment? Hum? I'm sure there's work in the private sector for you, if you so damned good.
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Andrew Coyne on Ron Breakenridge @ 9/3/2010 10:29:00 PM.

Full article by Coyne: The CRTC isn't just a nuisance, now it's a real threat

"In such a world of “spectrum scarcity,” it was argued, government regulation was essential to ensure a diversity of content—and, in Canada, to ensure that some of that content was Canadian. Or as the cultural nationalists had it, to make it possible for Canadians to “tell ourselves our own stories.” This was the world in which the CRTC was born.

Flash forward 40 or 50 years, to a very different world. Not only are there now hundreds of conventional television channels catering to every conceivable taste, but with the advent of Internet broadcasting the constraints of cost and spectrum have disappeared. There are literally hundreds of thousands of Canadian websites, each of them, post-YouTube, potentially a broadcaster in its own right. It is now possible for any Canadian with a video camera and a laptop to transmit to every other Canadian. And the cultural nationalists’ response? This just makes the case for more regulation."

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"...if Mochrie and his friends at ACTRA, the film and television actors’ union, have their way, that anyone who streams live video online would have to be “licensed and subject to regulations.” It means that anyone who provides the means for others to do so would have to be likewise licensed and regulated. And of course, there would have to be new taxes to fund this content, on the off chance that Canadians should not prove as eager as all that to be told more Canadian stories online. Ostensibly, the tax would be paid by Internet service providers. But we all know who would pay in the end."

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"...that is the essentially political mission in which Canadian artists willingly enlisted: to instill the proper feelings of loyalty to the Canadian nation-state in its citizens. They did so for the most sincere of motives: because that was where the money was.

Even as politics, it was nonsense. If we were so profoundly different from other nations as to warrant protection from their cultural exports, we were also different enough not to need it—always supposing that cultural difference was a worthy end in itself, or that anyone could define what was Canadian culture and what was foreign, or that the consumption of enormous quantities of foreign culture was not itself integral to being Canadian. That is even more true today. If “telling ourselves our own stories” is the goal, regulation is both unnecessary—absolutely nothing prevents Canadians from watching, or indeed finding, Canadian content, if they want to—and, for the most part, impossible."

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"Perhaps the media will now realize that the CRTC is no longer a mere nuisance, to be suffered in silence. It is a mortal threat: the most serious to press freedom in generations."

Be afraid, CBC. Be very afraid.

PS: Breakenridge's interview @ 9/3/2010 10:25:00 PM is also pretty good. All about God, creation, science and Stephen Hawkings. It pretty much sums up my beliefs. Unlike physics, God is the great mystery we can never understand. I can't understand physics, either, but that's another story.

I'm sure I've said this before, but the big bogeyman in the sky with the white beard that speaks with a booming voice and who sends lightning bolts down to earth to punish sinners, is for children. I suspect most people who triumphantly declare themselves to be atheists are rejecting this version and haven't bothered to dig any deeper into the mystery. In other words, their spiritual development is stunted in adolescence. I sincerely hope they will some day break free and travel the rest of the way into a mature understanding of what we can barely describe and that which we and cannot comprehend, but which we know to be true.