CRTC Responds to Media Consolidation by Doing Nothing...for now

When I first read the headline on CBC.ca I was optimistic. I mean it sounds good, and starts off well:

"The CRTC has brought in new regulations to restrict cross-media ownership as a way of ensuring a diversity of editorial voices in the same market."

But after that it sort of trails off.

The CRTC came under fire last year for allowing too much consolidation in the media after the CanWest Global purchase of Alliance Atlantis and Chum City being bought by CTV. It was hoped that the CRTC would impose some restrictions to improve media diversity. So, what has the CRTC decided to do?

1) They will impose limits so that one party would not control more than 45 per cent of the total television audience share as a result of a merger or acquisition.

2) A company will only be able to control two types of media outlets in any given market, so you can't own a TV Station, a radio station and a newspaper.

3) Finally the CRTC would "not approve transactions between cable or satellite delivery providers that that would allow one person to effectively control the delivery of programming in a market."

These restrictions, frankly, do not even live in this century but we'll get to that in a moment. As you continue to read the CBC article you begin to hit the fine print.

"The new rules are not retroactive and will not require any change to the current media ownership picture in Canada."

Because the CRTC considers the National Post and the Globe and Mail 'national' newspapers - no one is immediately affected by this. These restrictions also only apply to private broadcasters so the CBC, although they are behaving more and more like a commercial broadcaster, is not affected.

So, as I said, these rules effectively do nothing except possibly provide the grounds for blocking future mergers. As I also said, they do not belong to this century. Newspapers, television and radio are all headed 'online' - onto the internet, cell phones and .mp3 and .mp4 players. The entire concept of 'broadcast' is slowly fading away and the CRTC isn't regulating and shouldn't regulate what 'broadcasters' can do on their websites.

What we need is firm, inflexible Net Neutrality Legislation to give anyone, anywhere who decides to take content to the internet an equal (at least technologically) shot at being seen/heard/read. As I see it overseeing such legislation should be the focus of the CRTC in future. Without it I honestly don't know why we'd need a CRTC 20 years from now.