Michael Geist and I don’t usually agree, especially on areas like government intervention into the marketplace. Still, I respect him and his perspectives.
I was somewhat surprised to see the tone in his Law Bytes column in the Toronto Star yesterday: “More Web regulation doesn’t make any sense.”
I have come to learn that columnists don’t have much influence, if any, on what the headline writers choose to stick on top of our words. Imagine my surprise seeing the banner on Michael’s column agreeing with me that we don’t need more regulation on the net.
I found that some of the content in that piece coincided with a number of my viewpoints. Unfortunately, he wasn’t writing directly about Net Neutrality. Instead his article had to do with new media regulation.
The market-focus in his language sounds a lot like mine and even that of Minister Bernier. It is quite encouraging to see. He speaks of content production migrating from the protection afforded by government regulation to one mandated by market survival.
How is it that market forces are fine in this instance? Isn’t it a little inconsistent to acknowledge the benefits of light touch regulation for content production, but still be calling for net neutrality legislation?
Just as his article says, the CRTC had the right approach in terms of internet regulation 8 years ago with its new media decision.
Since that ruling, a remarkable array of new media services – including podcasting, Internet streaming and online video sites – have emerged outside of the traditional broadcast regulation model. Despite the success, recent submissions to the CRTC suggest that a growing number of stakeholders are increasingly wary of their unregulated counterparts and may be gearing up for a fresh look at Internet regulation.
I think the CRTC has sufficient tools in place to handle discriminatory behaviour.
Why not apply the same arguments for net neutrality? “Despite the success,” why would we want to risk neutering the ‘net with excess regulation?