Frickin Geniuses and the Ghost of Jack Valenti

WELL, YESTERDAY the CRTC opened hearings into the possibility of regulating the internet in some way -- and it was not an auspicious first day.

The people trying to articulate the case for some sort of levy-fund-y system to support the creation of Canadian internet projects didn't do a particularly great job of stating their case, and so got relentlessly hammered. I expect most of the coverage today will reflect this.

Why that shouldn't be the whole story:

The Writers Guild of Canada has a more nuanced and progressive view of these issues, which I'm sure you'll see for yourselves when they present next week. Is it a perfect proposal? No, of course not. It attempts to grapple with a landscape that hasn't fully taken shape yet.

In a way, this is exactly why the CRTC declined to get involved, the last time they took a look at grappling with the Net as part of the broadcast system, ten years ago.

Since that time, though, a lot has taken shape, including the rise and consolidation of ISP's so that now, about eight out of ten Canadians get their broadband pipe through one of the big telcos or cable companies. People are already making money on the net. It's just the people selling the pipe.

And how are they selling that pipe? And getting you to shell out for speeds you don't really get because the minute you do start downloading at high speed they throttle your traffic? Riggght. They're selling it on the backs of all the content you get to watch.

The last time we had a rough analogue to this, the Cable co's claimed that they shouldn't have to give anything to the production of Canadian Content because they were just a pipeline, not part of the broadcast system. (Does any of that sound familiar?)

The CRTC disagreed and the Canadian Television Fund was the result. That, too, is an imperfect mechanism, but those who argue against it inevitably invoke this or that selective definition of how "market forces" should replace it. Market forces. In a protected market where Canadian nets get a mulligan every time they run a U.S. show at the same time as the U.S. channel. We've also seen how perfect "market forces" have served the world economy just so excellent well in the last year. The dirty truth of the "market forces" approach, of course is that there is no such thing in a capitalist economy. Somehow, somebody always accrues advantage, and learns to game the system. Such is the way of the world.

Back to the net, though -- the problem this time is that these hearings take place in the shadow of what I call the Internet Frickin' Genius Syndrome.

This is the tendency for people to get exercised about everything to do with the internet, while exhibiting one of the great and persistent flaws of internet-borne information: a serious lack of big picture context.

Yes, the issues around Net Neutrality are serious. Yes. They're actually way more serious than Cancon on the net. But they're still one set of issues in an enormously complicated stew that needs to balance the rights and needs of consumers, ISP's and providers, and content creators such as myself. And this hearing is only supposed to be about the net as it relates to broadcasting. As the Chairman put it:

these hearings are to examine strictly broadcasting in new media and nothing else. The commission also seeks to examine the question of how to measure content and consumption of new media in order to implement any eventual regulatory measures.

Now, nine times out of ten, when you read something about these hearings, and what's at stake, it's not going to be somebody like Michael Geist jawing on. It's more likely to be somebody like, oh, I don't know.... this guy.

Internet Frickin' Genius Syndrome (IFGS) complicates the discussion because of the myopic tendency of people who are really, really, really into the internet to assume that everyone else but them is a total fucking idiot. [See also: Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Olbermann, et al AND Politics]

Now. A lot of the time that's true. But most of the time, over the next ten days or so, if you manage to lift your head from the desk to brave the slumber-inducing spectre of coverage on these new media hearings -- keep in mind that most of the people appearing do actually have some experience of the internet.

I've been grappling with a lot of these internet creative issues in one form or another for over fifteen years. I've visited the M.I.T. Media Lab and talked to Nicholas Negroponte, Bill Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and people at Wired when that mag mattered. I've interviewed Peter Gabriel and Todd Rundgren and Jaron Lanier; Michael Wolff and John Perry Barlow and the heads of the Web or New Media division of all the Canadian nets and many of the U.S. ones. I've walked halls and battered booths at NATPE and NAB and CES and E3, and held back the ponytails of Record Execs who vomited their fear into their soon-to-be repo'd solid gold commodes. I've talked with the Librarian of Congress about this stuff. I've shot the shit with web marketing gurus and AD directors, Game Designers and Nintendo executives; Disney imagineers and XBox'ers, Microserfs and Apple-nauts, French telecom dudes and Japanese VR venture capitalists. I've twiddled my thumbs in keynotes by Richard Florida and Donald Tapscott and Cory Doctorow and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. I've been stranded waiting for cabs in Silicon Alley, all over the I-35 tech corridor in Austin, Multimedia Gulch, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, etc, etc. etc.

I visited the offices of The Well, for Chrissakes. I've french kissed YouTube stars. And Sonic the Hedgehog once gave me a reacharound, ok? I'm not proud of it, but it happened. Mario, too. I did Luigi old school and watched Ms. Pac Man do rails off Solid Snake's ass.We clear now, G?

And... since the turn of this century, I've been trying to find my way through as a content creator. An ISP levy is an imperfect mechanism to try and encourage a place for projects in this industry that come from Canada.

Levies on blank media, and the photocopying levy have worked. And a levy system is behind a European approach to copyright that might just be superior to the flawed, crappy U.S. bills we've gotten so far.

So the first Frickin' Genius who sends me a "You don't understannnnnd the net, mannnnn...." email gets a virtual pop in the jaw.

Here's what we're not talking about over the next few weeks:

Geoblocking. That's really a broadcaster issue. Don't blame us that you can't see eps on Hulu. We just want to get our stuff on Hulu.

User Generated Content. Canadian writers do not want to do anything to stop you and your YouTube. Pinky swears.

Forcing you to watch something, or surf something. Please. Like we can do that now on TV. And you think we expect to be able to do it on the net? Man, you are a Frickin' Genius.

Censoring Sites Wholesale, like China or Iran. Oh for God's sake, take another hit off that bong, will you, Anakin3483netfreewarezforevr?

Take the drama (as opposed to Drama) out of this equation, and the bottom line is this: what we're trying to do is prevent a repeat of the sorry state of Canadian film distribution.

Canadian film distribution is to Canadian TV as a greasy piece of street meat is to Dinner at that hot NY Bistro that just got written up but is so cool that it doesn't even have a name.

That's because years ago, thanks mainly to tireless U.S. lobbyist Jack Valenti, our screens were chucked wholesale into the miasma of the American machine. Now, Canadian box office is counted as part of the U.S. Domestic box.

That's the stake. Yes, I know, I know, you don't care. But if you read your Richard Florida, you should be a little bit scared -- because the cavalier way in which the creative class is booted south in this country is breathtakingly short sighted.

So there will be proposals for how to fix that. And big telcos and cable co's that are fighting a class action lawsuit right now to try to hold on to that $7.95 a month system access fee that nobody can figure out are going to gee-shucks about how they can't absorb a 50 cent hit per subscriber. And that's fine. It's just fine.

Woooooooo -- oooooo --- ooooooh!

That's Jack for you. Listen to the wind from Gatineau, and maybe you can hear him rattling his chains.


*Please note, some of what I wrote above is tongue-in-cheek. But not IFGS. That shit is painful, like IBS, or commenters on your average news site.