Canadian Government Continues Its War On Internet Freedom With New 'Online Harms' Legislation

from the it's-very-bad dept

A few months ago, we wrote about the Canadian government's attempt to give its broadcast regulators sweeping new powers to regulate social media via Bill C-10 — a massive piece of legislation that seemed to only get worse over time thanks to unclear, ever-shifting provisions and a rushed, secretive amendment process before being passed by the House of Commons in the middle of the night. That bill is now in limbo in the Senate, and Canadians are waiting to see if it will come back in the September session or be preempted by an early federal election. Unfortunately, the stalling-out of Bill C-10 hasn't put a stop to the ruling Liberal government's efforts to create unprecedented new powers of internet regulation, and now their ongoing campaign is continuing with a technical paper outlining plans for more new legislation to address "harmful online content".

The planned bill is supposed to address five categories of content: terrorist content, incitement of violence, hate speech, non-consensual sharing of intimate images, and child sexual exploitation material. This apparently noble goal masks a wide range of utterly disastrous plans for stringent regulation that belong in the hall of fame for bad internet policy. The effort is headed up by Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault — the same Minister whose astonishing inability to answer questions about Bill C-10 all but confirmed that the law would do far more than its stated intent. In theory, the release of this technical paper is kicking off a public consultation, but the rushed and secretive procedure that happened with C-10 has left most observers completely unconvinced that the government will be genuinely receptive to even good-faith criticisms of the plan or its potential impact on free expression in Canada. Michael Geist describes it as:

...a process billed as a consultation, but which is better characterized as an advisory notice, since there are few questions, options or apparent interest in hearing what Canadians think of the plans.

... The perspective on [Online Communications Services] is clear from the very outset. After a single perfunctory statement on the benefits of OCSs which says little about the benefits of freedom of expression – the document does not include a single mention of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms or net neutrality – the government proceeds to outline a series of harms.

So just what would this proposed bill do to address its list of harmful content? It would establish a huge new web of bureaucracy consisting of a Digital Safety Commission, a tribunal to rule on content takedown demands, and an advisory board to shape ongoing social media regulation. Through this framework, "Online Communications Services" (the government lists Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter as examples) would face expansive new requirements, such as taking down content the bureaucrats deem unsuitable within 24 hours (we discussed how unrealistic and dangerous this is when the EU had the same idea) and adhering to new pro-active monitoring and reporting requirements that will force them to turn over information on Canadian users directly to federal law enforcement. The new Digital Safety Commissioner would have the power to determine whether their monitoring efforts are sufficient, including whether or not the use of AI tools is acceptable. This could have any number of consequences, all of them bad: aggressive over-blocking of content, invasive monitoring of users even in private messages (though the government insists private communication will not be covered, this government's history of failing to uphold its promised limits on internet legislation does not inspire much confidence), and Canadians getting visits from the feds for engaging in protected speech.

If platforms fail to comply with the requirements they could face hefty penalties, and ultimately the government could play its trump card: ordering all Canadian ISPs to block access in the country, depriving all Canadians of powerful tools for free expression because the companies were unable to meet impossible requirements. That's assuming that many platforms don't just stop operating in Canada themselves in order to avoid the stifling regulatory framework, because if you're wondering where these takedown demands will come from and what the required remedies will look like, the answer is... almost anyone, and almost anything:

In order to enforce these rules, the public could file complaints with the Digital Safety Commissioner. The new commissioner would be empowered to hold hearings on any issue, including non-compliance or anything that the Commissioner believes is in the public interest. The Digital Safety Commissioner would have broad powers to order the OCSs “to do any act or thing, or refrain from doing anything necessary to ensure compliance with any obligations imposed on the OCSP by or under the Act within the time specified in the order.” Moreover, there would also be able to conduct inspections of companies at any time.

Yes, the government wants to give a new commissioner the power to basically set any rules they want about how online platforms operate, for any reason, so long as it can be framed as a matter of "public interest" — and to be able to conduct random inspections to ensure compliance. It also provides extremely wide latitude for the commissioner to hold hearings in secret if the issue can be said to impact privacy, national security, international relations, national defense or confidential commercial interests, among other things. And that's not all: the planned legislation would also grant Canada's national intelligence service, CSIS, new powers to secretly investigate online threats.

And, for the pleasure of facing all these stringent new requirements that would make operating in Canada extremely unappealing if not impossible, online platforms get to foot the bill:

The proposed legislation will create new regulatory charges for OCSs doing business in Canada to cover the costs of the regulatory structure as the companies will pay for the Digital Safety Commissioner, the Digital Recourse tribunal, and the Digital Commission. As part of the payment requirements, the Digital Safety Commissioner can demand financial disclosures from OCSs to determine ability to pay and Canadian revenues.

And once again, because it's worth reiterating: the document outlining these plans never once mentions the Charter of Rights and Freedoms or, even in general, the right of Canadians to free expression.

It's hard to imagine a more appalling, arrogant move by this current government, even after its long history of trying to clamp down on the internet with powerful new regulations. These proposals are not new ideas: they've been floated and sometimes attempted in countries all over the world for years, and the huge problems they present have been discussed and dissected many times. But the government hasn't even paid lip service to criticisms and counterarguments, and its invitation for public comment feels perfunctory and irrelevant rather than sincere — especially with Minister Guilbeault's track-record of ignoring such criticism and failing to give clear answers to important questions.

If Bill C-10 is any indication, the House of Commons will rush this proposal through and frame opposition as bad-faith partisanship, while constantly tweaking the specifics in ways that will make it difficult for the public to even know precisely what the final bill says and does. The strongest obstacles to its passage are the Senate and the looming possibility of an early election, but Canadians can't rely too heavily on either of those things. It will take a truly massive deluge of official public comment submissions (accepted until September 25th), as well as pressure on Members of Parliament and some good old public outrage, to stand a chance of making this government pause before barreling forward with this disastrous plan.

Filed Under: canada, censorship, content moderation, digital safety commission, online harms, steven guilbeault, takedowns

The Stunning Inability Of Canada's Heritage Minister To Answer Questions About His Internet Regulation Bill

from the not-very-reassuring dept

We've written about Bill C-10, the Canadian government's attempt to bring online services under the auspices of the country's broadcast regulator, the CRTC, and the way the story about the bill keeps shifting and the promises about what it supposedly won't do keep being broken.

Now, work on the the bill has been paused after lawmakers from all four parties voted to ask the Department of Justice for a fresh analysis of its legality under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They've also asked for the bill's champion, Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, and others to come before the committee and discuss its implications. But Guilbeault has consistently demonstrated a total inability to give clear answers (or, sometimes, any answers at all) to questions people raise about their concerns with the bill. This has been made "crystal clear" (a term Guilbeault has wrongly applied to the muddy and vague bill itself) by some of his responses over the past couple of weeks.

First, at the end of April, Guilbeault was pressed for details in an interview on the CBC, with host David Common asking why the exclusion for social media content was removed from the bill and how the Minister can still claim it won't be impacted (you can watch the full interview here). As you can see, his answer — inasmuch as it constitutes an answer — is not very convincing:

Why won't Bill C-10 impact user content on social media? Because they're "not interested" in doing that and it's not the bill's "purpose". Oh and also the bill isn't finished. The fact that an exclusion to specifically prevent regulation of social media was removed is, apparently, irrelevant. The powers granted by the actual text of the bill are, apparently, irrelevant. The idea that regulators would use the regulatory powers given to them by the bill "has no basis in reality". Just trust him.

Not convinced? Well, a few days later in the legislature, Guilbeault was pressed by an opposition Member of Parliament on the free expression implications of the bill, and he gave even less of an answer:

Yes, you saw that — Guilbeault immediately pivoted to the completely unrelated topic of reproductive rights and lobbed accusations of hypocrisy at the questioner. Those accusations might not be entirely baseless, but they are entirely irrelevant to this subject that is of extreme importance to all Canadians, not just those on the opposite side of the political aisle from Guilbeault. The Minister also accused another MP of lying about the bill, and was reprimanded in the House of Commons and pressed to withdraw his statement. The Liberal party would very much like it if people viewed opposition to Bill C-10 as a purely partisan effort coming from disingenuous and dishonest opposition politicians, but nothing could be further from the truth.

But Guilbeault's evasiveness and foundering doesn't stop there. The latest interview (watch the whole thing here), in which he changed his previous story and stated that the bill will enable the regulation of users on platforms like YouTube, might be the worst one yet:

Guilbeault manages to contradict himself in a matter of seconds. After the understandably frustrated interviewer presses him, yet again, on his promises that the bill won't regulate social media users, he emphatically insists "individuals are exempt from this la-" and can't quite make it to the end of the word "law" before cutting himself off to say "or will be, once it's adopted". Then, in the very next sentence, he says that the bill will apply to individuals who "act like broadcasters" then vaguely asserts that such people are somehow completely distinct from "everyday citizens". As we discussed in the previous post, he then goes on to be completely unable to clarify how this line would be drawn. And then, the next day, he backtracked these comments and made more insistent promises that users will not be regulated.

Even Canadians who know very little about the subject of online regulation are noticing how desperate and vague Guilbeault gets every time he's pressed for details, and are unimpressed by his obviously evasive deflections in parliament. Now even MPs from his own party are seeking answers. If the government is going to do what it should and toss out C-10 to start over with a brand new bill, it also needs to find a more capable and trustworthy champion for it.

Filed Under: broadcast, c-10, canada, regulations, steven guilbeault, streaming

Minister Behind Canada's Social Media Bill Now Says It Will Regulate User Generated Content

from the shifting-stories dept

Update: The Minister has now attempted to backtrack these latest comments and repeated his insistence that the bill will not apply to social media users, though the impact the regulatory powers — which he says will apply to the platforms — will have on users remains unclear.

Throughout the Canadian government's legislative push to give broadcast regulators power over online services, the story on exactly what the bill would do has continually shifted, and its author, Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, has been consistently vague and evasive in the face of questioning from other lawmakers and the media. He has repeatedly insisted that Bill C-10 is designed to target large audio and video services that act like broadcasters, but will not impact individual users of sites like YouTube and Twitch — despite the fact that the clause which would have clearly prevented this was removed and a new amendment confirms that social media will be subject to at least some regulation.

The latest development is another change in the story: in a recent interview, Guilbeault stated that the new regulatory powers can apply to YouTube channels:

"What we want to do, this law should apply to people who are broadcasters, or act like broadcasters. So if you have a YouTube channel with millions of viewers, and you're deriving revenues from that, then at some point the CRTC will be asked to put a threshold. But we're talking about broadcasters here, we're not talking about everyday citizens posting stuff on their YouTube channel," Guilbeault said.

One of the main points critics of the bill have been making is that, despite Guilbeault's insistence that it won't impact individual users, he's never been able to explain why not given the powers the bill gives to the broadcast regulators at the CRTC. This latest comment just confirms it: whatever the stated intent, the bill leaves it up to the CRTC to decide if and when to extend their new regulatory powers to a user of a platform like YouTube. He frames this as not impacting "everyday citizens" but, of course, many everyday citizens on social media can get huge audiences on par with major broadcasting operations — that's kind of the whole point, and one of the reasons people are rightfully opposed to the government regulating people's speech on those platforms. And of course, as always, the bill doesn't offer any clear, solid protections against overreach — nor does Guilbeault:

Asked repeatedly what the threshold would be for CRTC scrutiny, whether a certain number of millions of followers, or a certain amount of advertising revenue, the minister said it’s something the government will ask the CRTC to determine, but that it would be entities that have a "material impact on the Canadian economy."

This vague and almost meaningless condition isn't very reassuring, especially coming from the same person who recently insisted that the bill wouldn't impact users of these platforms at all.

Opposition to the bill is rightfully growing throughout Canada and across party lines, and there's a growing amount of speculation about the legal challenges that C-10 is likely to face if passed. If the government really wants to achieve its primary stated goal of getting major audio and video services like Netflix and Spotify to support Canadian content the way traditional broadcasters are required to (a proposal that still raises significant questions that will need to be examined), they're first going to need to unveil a completely revamped bill that actually addresses people's very real concerns and places clear limitations on the CRTC's power to ensure that it won't curtail Canadians' freedom of speech, and stop trying to feed the country a vague and shifting story interspersed with desperate promises that the bill won't do what everyone can see it will.

Filed Under: c-10, canada, content, crtc, regulations, steven guilbeault, streaming, videos
Companies: youtube

Canadian Government Wants To Regulate Social Media Like Broadcast

from the not-gonna-work dept

It's Canada's turn in the carousel of attempts at terrible internet regulation around the world. The ruling Liberal party, which professor and internet law researcher Michael Geist has called the most anti-internet government in Canadian history for its wide variety of planned new internet laws, has been working for months on a bill to amend the Broadcasting Act and greatly broaden its scope, giving the CRTC (Canada's counterpart to the FCC) authority over all kinds of online video and audio.

Canada has a long history of requiring broadcasters to support and air Canadian content, setting percentages of airtime that must be dedicated to it. While this is controversial and of questionable efficacy, it is at least coherent with regards to television and radio broadcasting over public airwaves — but Bill C-10 would bring streaming services and many other websites under the same regulatory regime, which also includes even more concerning powers to regulate political speech. Supposedly, this is targeting services like Netflix and Spotify — which already raises some serious questions as to how such regulation would work — while the bill's champion, Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, has repeatedly insisted that it will not cover social media and user generated content. The clause excluding such content was already worryingly narrow, and now the government has removed it anyway. And yet Guilbeault continues to insist user generated content has nothing to worry about, even though there are multiple reasons this is clearly untrue — not least of which is a new "exception that proves the rule" amendment setting the contours of UGC regulation, to be considered soon:

The amendment is a clear acknowledgement that user generated content are programs subject to CRTC’s regulation making power. Liberal MPs may claim the bill doesn’t do this, but their colleagues are busy submitting amendments to address the reality.

But it is not just that the government knew that its changes would result in regulating user generated content. The forthcoming secret amendment only covers one of many regulations that the CRTC may impose. The specific regulation – Section 10(1)(c) of the Broadcasting Act – gives the CRTC the power to establish regulations “respecting standards of programs and the allocation of broadcasting time for the purpose of giving effect to the broadcasting policy set out in subsection 3(1).” While the government plans to remove that regulation from the scope of user generated content regulations, consider all the other regulations it intends to keep and impose on millions of Canadians. Regulations that are not found in the amendment and therefore applicable to user generated content include regulations:

(a) respecting the proportion of time that shall be devoted to the broadcasting of Canadian programs;

(b) prescribing what constitutes a Canadian program for the purposes of this Act;
(e) respecting the proportion of time that may be devoted to the broadcasting of programs, including advertisements or announcements, of a partisan political character and the assignment of that time on an equitable basis to political parties and candidates;


Each of these speak to potential new regulation on the free speech of Canadians. Most notable may be political speech, which gives the CRTC the power to order equal time for partisan political speech. While this was designed for broadcast networks, the legislation would now cover all programs, including user generated content.

Correction: The way the bill is worded, online services are apparently not covered by the "political balance" regulatory powers.

It's a stunning, virtually unprecedented attack on the free speech of Canadians. Among the bill's biggest problems is the fact that many of these powers are extremely vague and administered at the discretion of the unpredictable CRTC — which is also part of what allows the politicians behind it to equivocate and deny when pressed on what exactly it will do. It has been called "one of the most radical expansions of state regulation in Canadian history" by those journalists who have noticed just how far-reaching it might be:

While the government claims it would not empower the CRTC to regulate smaller services such as Britbox, social media sites such as YouTube, or online news content, the bill contains no specific provisions that would prohibit it – and includes provisions that seem to allow it. For example, while the bill exempts “programs that are uploaded to an online undertaking” by its users and “online undertakings whose broadcasting consists only of such programs,” it leaves the way open for the CRTC to regulate services that show both user-generated and curated content. Like YouTube.

Likewise, lots of streaming services offer news content alongside movies and other fare. And lots of text-based news organizations, such as The Globe and Mail, also stream audio and video. So a specific exemption for audiovisual news content would not be greatly reassuring, even if the bill contained one – which it doesn’t.

Luckily, the bill is getting much more attention following the latest changes. Unluckily, it's at risk of becoming mired in the broader partisan fights of Canada's parliament — even though this is a case of something that everyone, from every party (not least the Liberals pushing it) should oppose. I don't have to explain why applying such regulations, especially about political "balance", to social media would be a disaster for free speech, especially now with the pandemic keeping people trapped at home and spawning multiple political crises across the country. It's not at all clear how the CRTC would use these powers, but there's little reason to believe they'd use them wisely (as if such a thing is even possible), and the uncertainty alone could cause user generated content platforms to clamp down on what Canadians can share.

Plus, it's especially concerning the way the government has repeatedly misled the public about what the bill will do, often contradicting itself and leaving the text full of loopholes that means it might apply to all kinds of unexpected things like app stores. Canadians from every part of the political spectrum must recognize Bill C-10 as the astonishing attack on free expression that it is, and force the government to reject it — or else the internet in Canada is going to get a whole lot smaller and less open.

Filed Under: audio, c-10, canada, content moderation, crtc, internet, internet freedom, regulations, social media, steven guilbeault, streaming, video