North Koreans, Too, Have Plenty of Options On "The Channel"

38 North, a website that covers events in North Korea, reported this week that “multi-channel television” has expanded beyond Pyongyang into the provinces in North Korea in the last year. Most of the country had long only had one channel available, but now have up to four, although Pyongyang has had multiple channels for several years.

However, the arrival of the new channels isn’t an example of competition emerging against the incumbent state media-in fact, per the report, “the new channels can be seen as an attempt to make state media more attractive in the face of competition from illicit foreign content.”

Yes, well, not to be outdone:

Allowing the broadcast regulator to force social media platforms to show more Canadian content to users isn’t a freedom of speech issue, expert witnesses told MPs Monday, as a separate group of academics urged the government to ensure such measures don’t harm access to an open internet. ...

Algorithms operated by companies like Amazon and Netflix aren’t neutral and driven purely by consumer preferences, said Janet Yale, who headed the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review panel.

“Once we acknowledge that algorithms are not agnostic, then it’s really a question of, does cultural policy have a role to play” in ensuring Canadian choices are available in a world of “unlimited amounts of content,” Yale said.

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“That’s just the simple principle of discoverability. And it’s not about interfering with freedom of choice, it’s about promotion of Canadian choices,” she said. “Nobody has to watch it if they don’t want to watch it. So there is actually no restriction on freedom of choice whatsoever.”

(Sidebar: yes, about that - Youtube allows one to subscribe to a channel, filter out unwanted ads and like certain material. So, yes, Youtube is driven by the consumer.)

But a group of academics and experts wrote to the government Monday to say that Bill C-10, alongside other measures the Liberal government has proposed – including blocking or forcing take downs of some illegal content – has the potential to “adversely impact our freedom to access online content of our choice.” ...

(Sidebar: or, rather, directly and adversely impact the freedom of online content because that is what Guilbeault promised he would do.)

The government then proposed a further amendment, which would limit the CRTC’s powers over content posted to social media to discoverability, or the promotion of content from Canadian creators.

But giving the CRTC the power to determine what content is prioritized is a freedom of expression issue, said Michael Geist, Canada research chair in internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa and a signatory to Monday’s letter.

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“What you are seeing is that the government, through its regulator, gets to determine what gets prioritized. Not on a specific piece of content per se, but it’s going to make choices, elevating some, deprioritizing others,” Geist told MPs on the Heritage committee. “That clearly has an impact on individual Canadians’ expressive rights.”

Geist said it’s also unworkable for the CRTC to decide what will count as Canadian.

“Suddenly now we’re going to ask the CRTC to decide which cat video constitutes Canadian content, and which one doesn’t,” he said. ...

Geist said the issue isn’t about algorithmic transparency, which is “absolutely necessary” but actually covered by other legislation proposed by the government.

He argued “it’s not about whether we regulate algorithms, it’s about whether the CRTC and the government uses those algorithms to determine or prioritize or deprioritize what we can see.”

Instead C-10 “substitutes in some ways the government’s choices for the companies’ choices,” Geist said.

A handful of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats will tell everyone what their post-national opinion is.