Putting aside the 97 recommendations contained in Wednesday’s final report from the Broadcast and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel, Communications Future: Time to Act, the document reflects three important long-term shifts in the communications landscape.
The first relates to the sheer scope of media communication in our lives. This kind of report was a dime a dozen during the Cold War. But in those days, this was a lower-stakes game, as the calls for reform mostly were about tinkering with the formula governing how many times TV networks were required to air The Beachcombers and Check It Out!. Entertainment media was a one-way information flow. And consuming it represented a discreet and limited form of regulated activity, like driving on public highways or visiting a national park.
That has completely changed. Many of us spend our entire professional workday surrounded by digital media that blend entertainment, news and interpersonal communication in complicated ways. In 2020, “the communications sector” is inextricably tied with every aspect of our daily existence.
From the moment the world wide web was born in the 1990s, the CRTC, like its counterpart national regulators, had no idea what to do with it. The old regulatory model, which was based on controlling the content served up by a relatively small number of media spigots (radio and TV stations), didn’t scale well to a medium with millions of channels, the vast majority of them based outside Canada’s borders.
But that, too, has changed. And here we get to the second massive shift in the communications landscape signalled by this week’s report.
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