Post Tagged with: "crtc"

Facebook app by Eduardo Woo https://flic.kr/p/pfd7yn (CC BY-SA 2.0)

CRTC Says No Regulatory Action Planned Against Meta For Blocking News Links

In the months leading up to the effective date of the Online News Act, then-Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge urged the CRTC to investigate Meta’s decision to block news links on its Facebook and Instagram platforms as its method of compliance. Pointing to reports of people screenshotting news articles and the use of other workarounds the blocking of news links that came in response to the Online News Act (Bill C-18), St-Onge said “I cant wait to see what the CRTC will do when the law is fully enforced on Dec. 19.” As the law took effect and the issue grew, the CRTC did indeed send Meta a letter in October 2024 asking for information on how the company was complying with the legislation. I wrote about this request soon afterward, providing a detailed analysis of the law that sought to explain why some news sites might fall outside the scope of the legislation along with the legal grey area of screenshots.

This week, the CRTC finally responded to Meta on the issue.

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December 4, 2025 — 3 comments — News
1024px-Saw_VII_filming_Metro_Hall_Toronto by Alan Daly / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saw_VII_filming_Metro_Hall_Toronto.jpg

The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 252: Len St-Aubin on the CRTC’s Plan To Modernize Canadian Content Rules

The CRTC recently released its much anticipated decision on Canadian content rules, the first of two decisions that could reshape broadcasting and film/TV production in Canada. The Commission promoted its Cancon approach as offering new flexibility into the system but the fine print matters as some changes may be more restrictive than they appear at first glance. To help make sense of the decision, Len St-Aubin, the former Director General of Telecommunications Policy at Industry Canada, joins the Law Bytes podcast. Len provided consulting services to Netflix until 2020 and has since been an active participant in the debate on Internet policy as part of the Canadian Internet Society.

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December 1, 2025 — 1 comment — Podcasts
Facebook: The privacy saga continues by Ruth Suehle for opensource.com (CC BY-SA 2.0) https://www.flickr.com/photos/opensourceway/4638981545/sizes/o/

Privacy Lost: How the Government Deleted Bill C-11’s Key Privacy Principle Just Two Months After Passing it Into Law

The Online Streaming Act, the government controversial reform to the Broadcasting Act, continues to attract attention given an ongoing court challenge and backlash from the U.S. government. But there is another element of Bill C-11 that is deserving of attention. Due to what is likely a legislative error, the government deleted privacy safeguards that were included in the bill only two months after they were enacted. As a result, a provision stating that the Broadcasting Act “shall be construed and applied in a manner that is consistent with the right to privacy of individuals” was removed from the bill, leaving in its place two-near identical provisions related to official languages. The net effect is that with little notice (Monica Auer of FRPC spotted it), the Broadcasting Act has for the past two years included an interpretation clause that makes no sense and efforts to include privacy within in it are gone.

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August 25, 2025 — 18 comments — News
Mark Carney by ‘© House of Lords 2023 / photography by Roger Harris' https://flic.kr/p/2one51W CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Carney’s Digital Recalibration: How the Government is Trending Away from Justin Trudeau’s Digital Policy

Digital policies did not play a prominent role in the last election given the intense focus on the Canada-U.S. relationship. Prime Minister Mark Carney started as a bit of a blank slate on the issue, but over the past few months a trend has emerged as he distances himself from the Justin Trudeau approach with important shifts on telecom, taxation, and the regulation of artificial intelligence. Further, recent hints of an openness to re-considering the Online News Act and heightened pressure from the U.S. on the Online Streaming Act suggests that a full overhaul may be a possibility.

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August 8, 2025 — 6 comments — News
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Let Competition Be the Guide: Why the Government and CRTC Got It Right on Wholesale Fibre Broadband Access

Late last night, Industry Minister Mélanie Joly announced that the government was leaving in place a CRTC decision that granted wholesale access to fibre networks. By sheer coincidence, today the Globe and Mail runs my opinion piece on the issue, in which I argued that maximizing competition regardless of provider should be the guiding principle for the government. I start by noting that the Canadian struggle to foster greater competition in telecom and Internet services dates back decades. As early in the 1970s, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunication Commission (CRTC) mandated that dominant companies such as Bell provide access to their key network infrastructure to open the door to new marketplace entrants. In recent years, the debates have shifted to granting wholesale access to wireless and Internet networks to inject competition into those services.

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August 7, 2025 — 3 comments — Columns
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