8 ms·

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

45 points by throwawaysea 5y ago

mc32 5y ago
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.
- polishdude20 5y ago
  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.
  - vibrolax 5y ago
    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.
- kortilla 5y ago
  > 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.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    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.
- mynegation 5y ago
  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.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  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.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    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.
    - throwawaysea 5y ago
      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-chair-says-bill-c-10-should-not-be-passed-in-its-present/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-former-crtc...).
vernie 5y ago
Feeling eh-deprived.
Sytten 5y ago
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?
- polishdude20 5y ago
  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.
  - nickff 5y ago
    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.
  - randompwd 5y ago
    > 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?
    - mixedCase 5y ago
      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?
- Barrin92 5y ago
  > 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.
blakesterz 5y ago
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-music-episode-702-briefish-history-cancon/ https://www.ajournalofmusicalthings.com/ongoing-history-new-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content
- ipaddr 5y ago
  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.
  - FractalParadigm 5y ago
    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.
    - SKCarr 5y ago
      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.
dawnerd 5y ago
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.
chr1 5y ago
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".
faeriechangling 5y ago
"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-again.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/magazine/trudeaus-canada-... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > 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.
tenpies 5y ago
Canada could have been the best country in the world, having access to French cuisine, British culture, and American technology. Instead it chose to be the worst country in the world, picking French technology, British cuisine, and American culture. IMO taxing Canadians to produce losers that no one wants to watch is just subsidizing an elite class of "content creators" that add nothing to Canadian society. Instead they should let the private system work it out. Canada can produce fantastic television without doing it on the back of tax-payers, see: Letterkenny.
- munk-a 5y ago
  There are a number of misstatements here that I just wanted to clarify for anyone else: The design of this bill isn't such that'd it's leverage any serious weight on Canadian tax payers. Canada does produce some fantastic television and movies - and those fields already have CanCon related laws, this bill is specifically about extending that to internet borne content. For the rest of your comment, the food is quite amazing, poutine, tourtiere and mac'n'cheese with ketchup as far as the eye can see, along with a culture that isn't American yet (hence the existence of this law). Also, your tone could use work.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    I remember poutine being used as an argument that the french canadians didn't have any culture? [0]. Have things changed since then? [0] https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/05/29/cultural-appropriation-po_n_16869564.html https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/05/29/cultural-appropriat...
- dang 5y ago
  Yikes. No nationalistic flamebait on HN, please! It leads to nationalistic flamewars, which are a repetitive drag. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27149073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27149073.
alfl 5y ago
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.
908B64B197 5y ago
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?
- m-p-3 5y ago
  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.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > 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...
    - Pet_Ant 5y ago
      Protecting yourself from a monoculture is protecting multiculturalism.
  - nightfly 5y ago
    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.
- 3maj 5y ago
  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.
TMWNN 5y ago
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.)
908B64B197 5y ago
Sounds like a waste of time considering it won't pass the first amendment test.
- klyrs 5y ago
  In which country does the first amendment apply?
  - pmiller2 5y ago
    Stop being pedantic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_2_of_the_Canadian_Charter_of_Rights_and_Freedoms#Freedom_of_expression 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?
    - deanCommie 5y ago
      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?
    - munk-a 5y ago
      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.
    - klyrs 5y ago
throwawaysea 5y ago
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-under-attack-the-liberal-government-moves-to-have-the-crtc-regulate-all-user-generated-content/ 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.
deanCommie 5y ago
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.
commandlinefan 5y ago
If you want identifiably Canadian content, you can’t go wrong with Bob & Doug McKenzie.
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/CwVUb https://archive.is/CwVUb
zzo38computer 5y ago
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.

45 points by throwawaysea 5y ago

mc32 5y ago

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.

polishdude20 5y ago
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.
- vibrolax 5y ago
  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.
kortilla 5y ago
> 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.
- munk-a 5y ago
  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.
mynegation 5y ago
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.
throwawaysea 5y ago
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.
- munk-a 5y ago
  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.
  - throwawaysea 5y ago
    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-chair-says-bill-c-10-should-not-be-passed-in-its-present/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-former-crtc...).

vernie 5y ago

Feeling eh-deprived.

Sytten 5y ago

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?

polishdude20 5y ago
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.
- nickff 5y ago
  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.
- randompwd 5y ago
  > 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?
  - mixedCase 5y ago
    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?
Barrin92 5y ago
> 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.

blakesterz 5y ago

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-music-episode-702-briefish-history-cancon/ https://www.ajournalofmusicalthings.com/ongoing-history-new-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content

ipaddr 5y ago
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.
- FractalParadigm 5y ago
  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.
  - SKCarr 5y ago
    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.

dawnerd 5y ago

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.

chr1 5y ago

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".

faeriechangling 5y ago

"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-again.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/magazine/trudeaus-canada-... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative

908B64B197 5y ago
> 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.

tenpies 5y ago

Canada could have been the best country in the world, having access to French cuisine, British culture, and American technology. Instead it chose to be the worst country in the world, picking French technology, British cuisine, and American culture. IMO taxing Canadians to produce losers that no one wants to watch is just subsidizing an elite class of "content creators" that add nothing to Canadian society. Instead they should let the private system work it out. Canada can produce fantastic television without doing it on the back of tax-payers, see: Letterkenny.

munk-a 5y ago
There are a number of misstatements here that I just wanted to clarify for anyone else: The design of this bill isn't such that'd it's leverage any serious weight on Canadian tax payers. Canada does produce some fantastic television and movies - and those fields already have CanCon related laws, this bill is specifically about extending that to internet borne content. For the rest of your comment, the food is quite amazing, poutine, tourtiere and mac'n'cheese with ketchup as far as the eye can see, along with a culture that isn't American yet (hence the existence of this law). Also, your tone could use work.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  I remember poutine being used as an argument that the french canadians didn't have any culture? [0]. Have things changed since then? [0] https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/05/29/cultural-appropriation-po_n_16869564.html https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/05/29/cultural-appropriat...
dang 5y ago
Yikes. No nationalistic flamebait on HN, please! It leads to nationalistic flamewars, which are a repetitive drag. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27149073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27149073.

alfl 5y ago

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.

908B64B197 5y ago

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?

m-p-3 5y ago
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.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > 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...
  - Pet_Ant 5y ago
    Protecting yourself from a monoculture is protecting multiculturalism.
- nightfly 5y ago
  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.
3maj 5y ago
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.

TMWNN 5y ago

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.)

908B64B197 5y ago

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

klyrs 5y ago
In which country does the first amendment apply?
- pmiller2 5y ago
  Stop being pedantic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_2_of_the_Canadian_Charter_of_Rights_and_Freedoms#Freedom_of_expression 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?
  - deanCommie 5y ago
    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?
  - munk-a 5y ago
    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.
  - klyrs 5y ago

throwawaysea 5y ago

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-under-attack-the-liberal-government-moves-to-have-the-crtc-regulate-all-user-generated-content/ 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.

deanCommie 5y ago

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.

commandlinefan 5y ago

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

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/CwVUb https://archive.is/CwVUb

zzo38computer 5y ago

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.