Today was a good day. An unbelievably frantic one, but a good day nonetheless. I’ve been pouring blood, sweat and tears into a submission to the CRTC’s hearings on Bell’s bid to buy Astral Media to be held in Montreal next month. Today was the deadline for submissions to the CRTC. My submission is part of an intervention by the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, Consumers’ Association of Canada, Canada Without Poverty, and Council of Senior Citizens’ Organizations of British Columbia opposing the Bell/Astral deal. The documents were filed with the CRTC today.  All submissions to the CRTC can be found on its website here.

Cross-posted from Mediamorphis Sometimes I just wish I could wake up in the morning and not be thrust into the hurly-burly of all the stuff roiling the telecom-media-Internet industries in Canada. But no! If it ain’t copyright maximalists trying to lock up content (Bill C-11) or spooks trying to stuff the telecom-Internet infrastructure with new surveillance gear (Bill C-30), it’s big TMI conglomerates like Bell swallowing up erstwhile competitors like Astral. Now, this is not just a little deal, but a massive deal between Bell/CTV, the largest TMI conglomerate in the country with revenues of just over $22 billion, and Astral, the eighth largest media outlet in Canada with revenues of $888.1 million in 2010. While Astral is the fifth largest television operator (after Bell/CTV, Shaw/Global, Quebecor/TVA, CBC, in that order) and second largest radio station owner (after the CBC) in Canada, it is but a pygmy alongside Bell. If this deal goes through, we will have lost yet another independent and our position as having one of the most concentrated set of TMI industries amongst the developed capitalist economies will be yet further cemented (see here).

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve been away for a while. Sorry about that for those of you who missed me. Let’s just say that I learned the hard way the steep cost of blogging, twitter, facebook, writing for the Globe and Mail, all for free, while holding down a real paying job where one has to actually teach, research and contribute to the department you’re in. There’s only so many hours in a day. While away there’s been a mounting backlog of stuff to write about, and over the next few weeks I’ll unfold a series of blogs, but let me kick off with the current state of play for the Copyright Modernization Act (Bill C11). This is the fourth effort to revamp copyright law in Canada in the last seven years, and things are rapidly coming to head. The bill itself has numerous elements that are actually not bad as currently written (no term extension for copyright holders, a very limited role for ISPs, search engines and others as ‘digital gatekeepers’, an innovative user created content add-on to fair dealing, etc.), but deeply troubling aspects as well (the digital locks provisions, notably).

Cross-posted from Mediamorphis The world has been sitting on pins and needles since the CRTC’s hearings on vertical integration in the telecom-media-Internet industries held in June.  CRTC’s just come out with its new vertical integration decision today. You can see the press release here or the full decision here.

Editor's note: This Policy Watch piece is a rare look at Canada's media economy from the perspective of an academic researcher, rather than the usual commercial consultants. In this detailed entry, Winseck shows that media and the Internet—wired and wireless telecom services, tv, multi-channel pay tv, cable, satellite & IPTV distributors, newspapers, magazines, music, radio, Internet access, search engines, social network sites—are becoming increasingly prevalent in Canada's economy and in its citizens' lives. Canada has a large media economy. It has grown vastly larger and more complex over the past quarter-of-a-century. While often cast as a pygmy compared to the colossal size of the U.S., the Canadian media economy is in fact the eighth largest on the planet, as Figure 1 shows. It has also largely stagnated in sheer economic terms since the onset of the Great Recession, 2007ff.

Cross-posted from Mediamorphis We are at a fundamental turning point, a constitutive moment when decision taken now will set the course of developments across the telecom-media-Internet ecology for years, maybe decades, to come. We’ve just finished one set of hearings, and two more are on the immediate horizon: the CRTC’s hearings on Usage-Based Billing that begin Monday, July 11 and its upcoming so-called ‘fact finding’ hearings on Over-the-Top/new media.

Cross-posted from The Globe And Mail In the first of two column’s last week I offered evidence and argument as to why the CRTC’s current vertical integration hearing is not likely to deal effectively with the question of telecom, media and Internet concentration in Canada. Sitting in on three days of hearings has convinced me that the prospects may be even dimmer than I thought.

Written for The Globe And Mail The CRTC’s hearings on vertical integration begin Monday. For the next two weeks, this means that the four major vertically integrated media companies in Canada – Bell, Shaw, Rogers and Quebecor – could face tough questions about whether they have the clout to dominate telecom, media and Internet services across the country and, if so, what should be done to curb that potential?