Keeping the internet simple servant free is vital to the individuals right to communicate, just a sliver of a wedge is too much. Once in the restrictions would never cease in their zeal to "protect us". To me the net is not only my freedom to express myself but it also allows the police to shop the super market of leads for those that do wrong.

The 'survey' you link is defective and in my view
should be ignored in favour of comment directly to our political actors.

Wes

Nic Nanos is a hack Grit pollster. Enough said.

To the CHRC and Nanos and any other control freaks .... HANDS OFF THE INTERNET!

It is that only place left that one can feel even a little bit free of the yoke of the nanny state. Far more good will come from a free and open Internet than one controlled by government goons.

If the state truly wants to protect us, I suggest they let us elect our judges build more jails and get violent criminals off the streets. Also, allow us some armed self-defense rights.

And finally let's have some serious immigration reform. IE no more immigration from the Islamic world or the Caribbean world. Let's fast track the deportation system.

Shamrock, I think you're right. Having said that, if they get overwhelmingly negative feedback, and they seem to be, it gets harder for them to spin the results into the "opinion" they are trying to manufacture. I think it's plain that this issue is another front in the free speech battle, and is directly related to how the i'net has allowed conservative dissent to undermine the Canadian left's "Great Leap Forward".

Question - How come the conservatives have not cleaned out these liberal-loving commissions?

There was a need for a broadcast regulator when there were twelve or thirteen TV channels and only so much room in the AM/FM frequencies. But now that, via the internet, the number of available "channels" is unlimited, effectively, there is no excuse for some quasi-governmental suit to make decisions about content.

To use an analogy, suppose that during a famine someone or some group has the job of rationing out food to make sure everyone gets their fair share; that's reasonable. But if those people attempted to continue their role after the famine ended, and there was a massive surfeit of food -- fifty times more than enough for everybody -- they would obviously be laboring under some misapprehension that they are rulers of other people in some larger,general sense that doesn't have anything to do with food.

The CRTC are trying to maintain their control without any rationale whatsoever. Who are they to even hint that they might have any say whatsoever in what Al & Mike, for example, talk about, or should have more or less of Canadian content X, or more or less advertising, or of what sort?

It's like a phone conversation -- you dial up a number and voila, you're listening to someone on the other end. So what if it's a conference call -- where does the CRTC fit in, regarding the content of the conversation?

It doesn't. We understand that they *think* they know better than the actual, ineffable marketplace of ideas, but that's an affectation and a craven presumption on their part.

As John V said, "Far more good will come from a free and open internet than one controlled by government goons." Sometimes goons are rosy-faced guys in suits and gals in pantsuits who try to dissolve real life *out there* -- i.e. here -- in *process.* And it's just an arm of politics -- progressive politics, wherein a presumptuous group at the top decide how everyone else is to think and live.

Cascadian, your question was clearly ironic and therefore I waste no one's time with a specific answer. The iron law of bureaucracies apply in every government, something their creators count on, many times with malice aforethought: in my lifetime I have never seen so much as one extant agency or commission actually done away with by legislative fiat. You might call it Lady McBeth's Rule, What's done cannot be undone. Only wholesale revolution serves to destroy the total structure.

No matter what the CRTC does I will have my GREY AREA Dishnet and watch all the American content I want. FOR FREE bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

When it comes to regulating the Internet, there are, as Henry Kissinger likes to say, two parts to the problem. Firstly, the Internet is already regulated. For example, there are laws against spam, cracking, denial of service attacks, theft of data, &c. And that's a good thing, because the Internet is no longer a toy or an experiment or a revolution, it is now of that fairly rare class of beast known as a public utility (like power, water, roads). This is because of the huge dependency that organizations, commerce, engineering, science, medicine, &c have come to have on it, and because, like other public utilities, it has a natural sort of "backbone" network structure to it.

It's an interesting evolution, considering that in the '80s ARPANET days nothing commercial was allowed on the net. Then there were the wild west days in the '90s. And now law and order have started to root and grow. But I digress.

In regard to the first part of the problem, the Internet, and in particular the backbone, will, I think, come to be regulated in the future by something more or less equivalent to an Internet Public Utility Board. Their job will be to look after things like publicly acceptable quality of service and regulating things like traffic shaping and extra-cost high-bandwidth toll lanes, and other good things like that, while still preventing those technologies from getting out of hand, again, in the public utilities sense.

The second part of the problem is what is up with the CRTC and with content regulation in the broadcast sense per se? Traditionally, the CRTC has tended to be about promoting and enforcing so-called Canadian content. However, they have at least in some cases in the past, in the name of rigid dogma, prevented some useful technologies from being properly deployed. Needless to say, if their new-found bureaucracy-saving make-work effort strays into the technology area, they will screw it up.

Yet the Canadian Content side is more interesting, perhaps, at least in the sense of trying to anticipate what they might actually do. What kinds of things could they say? Canadian blogs must be written by Canadians? Canadian blogs must link to some percent of Canadian sources? Canadians must read a certain percentage of Canadian blogs?

If I may riff off EBD's AM/FM analogy, the Internet is more like short wave. How can the state regulate short wave? Well it can't, really, unless they ban short-wave equipment. Of course, the Internet isn't that porous, so we do see some effective filtering in some countries, but it leaks. I think China would simply ban the Internet if they could afford to, but they can't afford to, because of the utility nature I described above.

I s'pose the CRTC could propose some sort of Great Firewall of Canada, yet I think that might be a rather difficult sell, and for the same reasons that the freedom of speech issue is currently receiving support from both sides of the aisle. Indeed, foolish attempts at Internet content regulation could come back to bite them on the asp.

It will be interesting to see where this goes, in particular because of the somewhat bizarre self-referential nature of the Internet. That is, in previous CRTC work, the negotiations were typically between the regulators and the producers, and we end users usually didn't even know about it unless the producers (broadcasters) told us. This time, we end users will be in the thick of it, which might produce some novel results.

I hate the CRTC. Only twice in my lifetime have I been able to smile when I think about this subject. For the last two years since I've had HDTV I've had the pleasure of watching the American broadcast of the Super Bowl. It will be interesting to see how long this little victory lasts.(I might have said too much)

Speaking of CRTC. I haven't watched Bill Mahr since he got booted and started his show on HBO.(I don't get HBO) Now I can pod cast his show and it seems he has turned into a LOON. I used to respect many of his opinions, but now he has gone off the deep end. He is still funny, but what a clown.

Just a suggestion. In light of the Human Rights Commissions posting racist comments on sites and then charging the sites for it, maybe a similar tactic should be emoployed against the CRTC. Post some politically incorrect comments on the CRTC site and then file a Human Rights complaint. I like the full circle aspect.

The CRTC should have absolutely nothing to do with the internet. I'd prefer to have absolutely no regulation of the internet at all, but as Vitruvius has pointed out, the internet backbone now has the nature of a public utility.

Ideally, there should be just the minimal amount of regulation that is needed to deal with issues such a maintaining net neutrality and dealing with attacks on net infrastructure and abusers of the system such as ISP's that are home to spammers. Having been involved with the internet since the early 1980's I often get nostalgic for those simpler days when self-regulation worked extremely well.

I suspect what may be happening here is the dinosaurs of the MSM making one last attempt to assert their control over a medium which is making them irrelevent.

The CRTC is loathed by all freedom loving people and I can't understand why the conservative government hasn't decided to cut off its funding as a cost saving measure.

When they are interested in policing those who attack stay at home mom's, males, gun owners, minorities who vote conservative, Christians, Red Necks, Blonds, Europeans, Members of the Military,

Then I will care, I like how they claim they want to give more money to Canadian bloggers, they should shut down the CRTC and give the [free] tax money that they would otherwise waste, to Candadian bloggers based on hits, before they all move to Panama.

By email to Nic Nanos-

State censorship and the CRTTC

First, I've been on the net since the $_ days, and at one time, owned and operated the largest Canadian Trucker's website and fora. After attempting unsucessfully to have the site be self supporting through advertizing, and losing members for going commercial, and suffering several related hack attacks, I converted to a blog structure, and quietly faded away. I find your quasi-blog format as deliberately designed to obfuscate the issue at hand.

You are seeking the opinion of the younger, less experienced web user, or you would have used a threaded format. To expect an intelligent discussion where the last comment takes precedence, is to obscure the actual question. In my opinion, to be intellectually honest, ask a specific question, let the responses flow downwards, and don't truncate the responses. Take a lesson from Compuserve, undoubtedly the best communications structure ever created, even though it didn't transition to the Web due to costs.

As far as the CRTTC goes, it was designed as a means of state censorship, and still follows that mandate. The CBC is taking $34 per year per Canadian and using it to generate hard line Statist propaganda in support of the left, primarily the Liberal Party of Canada and through Al Gore, the Democrat Party in the US, but where time permits, anti-Israel, pro-Palestine fillers. With the CRTTC controlling the rest of the media, we are served up with a steady diet of leftist, statist propaganda, from free local rags to daily papers and the local and national television. Many Canadians, such as I, have turned away from the obvious propaganda, and are getting our news from around the world via the internet. While much on the Web is also propaganda, we are intelligent enough to filter it through a lens developed by time, effort and peer review.
The CRTTC revisiting this issue, is part and parcel of the federal bureaucrats attempting to continue the subjugation of the the citizenry that started with the election of Trudeau, undoubtedly the stupidest person ever to sit in the PM's office. In spite of Canada replacing the corrupt hard line Statist government of Cretien with the moderate middle-ground liberal government of Harper, the mandarins in Ottawa continue to ignore the BNAct , The Constitution and the Bill of Rights, using Section 13 of the HRAct, punitive taxation, burdensome regulations and inertia to force us into a fascist state.

Any protection of Canadian content guarantees the lessening of the quality of that content. The supremacy of the free market also applies to ideas and art. An artist is no different than any other worker. If a product sells, it is successful, if it doesn't, too bad, try again. To subsidize an artist takes the fruits of other's labour in a wealth transfer that makes all poorer. The producers worked harder for less, and the artist failed to learn a lesson from their failure, insulating them from the urge to improve.

As a former member of the RCMP, and a two term former politician, I tend to look at the big picture, and relate individual items such as this back to that worldview. Fascist States rarely ever are produced with a bang, rather they are typically formed incrementally, with the citizens waking up one day to realize they are serfs.

Ian Vaughan