My name is Sara Bannerman.
Welcome to the Communication and Cultural Policy Conference
in the Age of the Platform.
We're here now for the session, Platform Governance:
Media Policy or Telecommunications Regulation as a Guide, which is organized by
professor Dwayne Winseck at Carlton University.
I will introduce
Dana.
So Dana is coming to us here from the University of Calgary.
Welcome Dana.
We haven't
met before, but it's very nice to meet you.
And I'm looking forward, hopefully, to hearing
your presentation today, "The Internets."
I love the pluralization, we've got
more than one internet.
And so "The Internets: the changing relevance of internet protocols
in next generation broadband networks."
So while I've still got a connection, I'll turn it over to you, Dana, and I hope
I'm here at the end of your presentation, in all the way through.
Take care.
Thank you.
I'll just quickly get started.
Hello, my name is Dana Cramer and I am a soon-to-
be completed and outgoing MA student at the University of Calgary and incoming PhD student
at Ryerson University this fall.
Today, I'll be talking about a growing development in international internet
standardization being the fragmentation of transport layer internet protocols, and how
this has spurred from evolving broadband networks and the internet of things.
To start,
I would like to recognize I am presenting from Calgary, Alberta, which is Treaty Seven
land and the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy, comprising the Siksika,
Piikani and Kainai First Nations, as well as
the Tsuutʼina First Nation and the Stoney Nakoda,
including the Chiniki, Bearspaw and Wesley First Nations.
Calgary is also home
to Métis Nations of Alberta Region 3.
Historically the internet's transport layer has been dubbed as dumb pipes with smart edges,
and that the power of the internet rested in
these edges, with the core being passive.
The
internet, as we know it today, is built on one standard being TCP/IP developed by
Vinton Cerf and Bob Khan in their work on the ARPANET project.
TCP/IP as a transport
protocol suite has prevailed in decades of discourse surrounding the evolution of the
transport layer of the Internet's infrastructure.
That, however, was challenged on the 18th of
July, 2018 in Geneva, Switzerland, when Dr.
Richard Li, chief scientist of FutureWei, HuaWei Technology's US-based research division,
gave a 21 slide presentation at the third annual ITU IMT-2020 5G Workshop and Demo
Day.
This demonstration day was part of an international telecommunication union, or
ITU,
conference for determining working study groups across the ITU-T, which is a standardization
sector of the ITU for the study of evolving 5G technologies.
So at the presentation, Li emphasized that the current TCP/IP protocol suite could
not keep up with the trajectories of internet usage, which had progressed from text, image,
voice, video, virtual reality, and on the horizon, holograms.
He argued that TCP/IP
as a protocol suite could not transfer the bits of data fast enough for evolving
networks past 5G with reduction in latency.
As he stated in this 2018 presentation, if we design a network to support 5G, we'd better
design it for lifespan going over 5G.
In this slide where he first makes this argument,
we see these parallel roads, one with roadblocks and augmented without creating an imagery
of growth through focus on future broadband networks and next generations of wireless.
In this slide and throughout his presentation to the ITU, as 5G comes and passes, there
will be vast changes in the data consumption due to changing uses of the internet.
These changes would require a terabyte per second data transfers post a 5G-enabled
gigabyte per second transfers along the TCP/IP transport layer.
The projected uses
for the terabyte per second transfer would first and foremost be for new options
of holograms.
Li emphasizes this with a slide half devoted to a scene from the first Star
Wars movie, where Luke Skywalker has turned on the hologram of Princess Leia asking old
Ben Kenobi for help.
To conclude his presentation.
Li has a call to action for the ITU in big blue bolded
font: We are proposing a new focus group on network 2030 in SG-13.
We welcome and invite you
all to join us and help shape a new internet.
SG-13 is a designation to represent
ITU-T's study group 13 future networks with focus on IMT 2020, cloud computing, and trusted
infrastructure.
The objectives of the study group are to focus next generation networks, or NGNs, with a
special
focus on future networks and mobile telecommunications.
Their role is to study NGNs and make standardization
policy recommendations, which are more energy-efficient,
support new industries like intelligent
transport systems, and overall standardizing enhancements for new introductions of ICT,
which rely on these NGNs.
Where NGNs continue to be the primary focus of SG-13, this is beginning to change. Now,
SG-13 has also been mandated with the task of future networks, or FNs, which are defined
as networks past NGNs, which will be the 5G and beyond era.
The mandate of SG-13 is fast.
They are expected to aid in standardization research on international scale for analog
to digital transitions, aid in NGN to FN transitions,
provide research and recommendation on standards
to help energy consumption along these NGNs
and FNs in cloud computing infrastructure and acts as a surface.
They are also asked
to continuously research IOT technologies and standards to support them and are required
to do all of this with a framework mission of environmental and socioeconomic awareness.
Overall SG-13 has given an incredibly large mandate and increasingly relevant area of
the global economy being internet infrastructure.
For Canada, representation in SG-13, and more broadly, the ITU-T, Ericsson Canada is our
main representative.
This is part of ISED's national study groups, or the NSGs, to marry each of
the ITU-T study groups.
These NSGs are part of what are called the Canadian national
organization for the ITU-T, or CNO/ITU-T.
The CNO/ITU-T was established in 1973 with a set objective to promote and coordinate
Canadian participation in the activities of the ITU-T. In the longer thesis that I write,
I do have quite a bit of criticism of ISED's model for CNO/ITU-T, specifically
as it relates to excluding the CRTC from this group.
All these industry partners,
and also academic partners with Concordia, for example, they're not compensated for
their labor, which has resulted in Canadian public knowledge of what is occurring at the
ITU-T, specifically in SG-13, as being quite limited.
From Richard Li's 2018 presentation, a focus group was in fact enacted in SG-13 and proposed
a following dramatic change to the internet
we know today. Networks overall, not only at
the edge, have become increasingly richer in
terms of technology ownership and end user
participation.
Quite likely there will not just be one, but many public internets.
New technologies further widen the constraints for transmitting packets through the utilization
of infrastructure-based wireless, wireless mesh, satellite, fixed line technologies,
such as fiber optics, all of which must be accompanied
by the fundamental packet transfer solution,
while adhering to the underlying ownership relations
when transversing those different networks.
As a consequence, the end-to-end realization
of services across those many internet environments
need strong
consideration for Network2030 and is an increasing departure from the structures of networks
as we see today.
In other words, which I can, and Cisco have also noted,
we are about to see an end to the end-to-end principle.
This point of many public internets
to focus group, which was chaired by Richard Li, is described in this white paper and a
subsequent aggressive public relations campaign by Huawei as ManyNets.
It is important to
note, however, ManyNets is a PR campaign opposed to a key term,
whereas internets is more appropriate, as this
has always occurred specifically in the largest
transport layer developer being NASA since 1997.
The aggressive marketing campaign to think of ManyNets as internets,
as a logical progression and internet infrastructure has
been most apparent
as HuaWei have attacked two female UK-based journalists.
This occurred first in a blog post by HuaWei,
where they specifically take an article by the Financial Times in the UK, which is the
only news source of these emerging internets to come.
This news report was analyzing how
Huawei and other Chinese companies and innovation departments in the Chinese government have
submitted a standardization request for what they call new internet protocol or new IP,
which is the new and next internet the SG-13 focus group had specified as needing for future
broadband networks and wireless technologies.
A second area where the steam of attacking journalists' credibility came into fruition
at a talk by the Internet Society this past September.
In this talk, Li, pictured above
in his panel with Internet Society CEO Andrew Sullivan and Milton Mueller as moderator.
As he states, about 20 minutes into the talk, when him and Mueller are discussing media
coverage of new IP, he states, firstly, I would say don't trust media.
Media is a lot of misinformation and
disinformation there.
And it is quite misleading.
So unfortunate,
people even make a, like a decision and influenced from the media.
It should be noted that the
journalistic coverage of new IP is correct, had contacted Li prior to publication
for comments, which he refused, and consulted with various internet experts, such as Shoshana
Zuboff, author of the Age of Surveillance Capitalism,
representatives to NATO, and historic European
internet engineers.
Cisco and ICAN have also come out in high refusal of this new set of
protocols, which will fragment the internet into bearing internets within the 2030 to
2035 timeline.
Its fragmentation comes down to where you start on these two questions.
Do we want this?
How do we do it?
Currently, there are technologies which have been expressed as
being wanted.
However, the TCP/IP suite affordances will not support them, holograms
being the most prevalent.
This knowledge of our placement of TCP/IP is not new.
It's always been lingering, and as Britt Paris' PhD dissertation defended in 2018 was its
first articles stemming from that work published at the start of this year.
The US has had
its NSF funding on three contenders over the past decade for this new Internets reality.
Her research has also identified that engineers have been using intricate ways to get around
the TCP/IP limitations, using the HTTP protocol as a fail-over.
My research builds on this conversation of internet fragmentation and future internet,
showing that this is not just Huawei or a Chinese
government campaign, but instead one which
was set to happen.
In their research, Weyrauch, who is a PhD candidate in Germany
and Winzen published this past February, a study conducted showing the three waves
of internet protocol standardization first occurring with the academic DARPA
sorry, DARPA-funded institutions.
Second, release that we see of the internet
with US-based technology corporations in the standardization of RFCs.
But since 2018, also when Richard Li called for the focus group with ITU-T's SG-13,
we see Huawei with the IETF is the largest RFC submitter, thereby shaping internet standards.
Again, my work builds on these findings of Huawei becoming a large internet standardization
player globally.
As recently as less than a month ago, the US Senate has now proposed a
bipartisan bill to counter emerging Chinese internet standardization dominance.
In it,
section 209 B1, the bill states, the United States and its allies and partners
should maintain participation and leadership international standard settings bodies for
fifth and future generation mobile telecommunication
systems and infrastructure.
The bill has gone
through two readings in the US Senate foreign relations committee as of the 15th of April,
2021.
And it's too early to see how this bill will
affect Canada as an ally to the US in international
telecommunication bodies.
But what my thesis more generally shows in its entirety is that
transport layer internet protocols are not just passive dumb pipes, but instead highly
political in their inception.
And since 2018, are being heavily challenged in international internet standardization
arenas, as well that the TCP/IP suite is not a future-proof technology and is about
to hit its end, along with the end of the end-to-end
principle.
Thank you.
All right.
Well, thank you very much Dana.
Here I am.
I'm now flipping back
and forth between two screens, but enough about
me, Dana.
That was a really lovely, it's very
hard to get into the inside of Chinese attempts to shape internet technology
and policy within the country and internationally.
So hats off to you for a really excellent paper, and well delivered.
So
I'm going to turn it over now to Lianrui, and I am just going to turn
it over to you Lianrui, and you can introduce your topic because I can't navigate
two screens anymore.
Okay.
So, can you see my screen okay?
[Dwayne Winseck]: Yes.
Okay, great.
So, hello everyone.
And thank you so much for having me and thanks for being here.
So my talk is going to be about how
Apple app store is governed in China.
And I feel like this is such a nice way flowing from
David's presentation to Dana's.
But kind of, as a case study, of how to tie up all
these,
topics all together.
So a bit of introduction, when we're talking about app stores, they are regarded as very
powerful, and also as a form of infrastructural platform services.
So they are crucial for
both the economics development and growth of the platform.
So, as we see, as manifested,
with the introduction of iPhone and their whole control of iOS and as developer ecosystem,
and also several other scholarly studies have looked at how Apple app store is a gatekeeper
of freedom of expression.
So these studies are largely situated in a Western context
and looking at how app stores have taken down apps
in some circumstances.
And in
a 2018 piece, Tarleton Gillespie has a further look at the governance by app stores and argues
that they are very important in terms of controlling
the quality and editorial process of
the app publications.
And they're essentially serving as a fairy house as well as a marketplace.
And also I
think, as David just illustrated, serving the control of the tools, so the API, the
STKs
for the app developers.
So, a lot of this illustration as a, kind of expanding
on slash project in my post-doc research, I find that a lot of the studies are positioning
the platform companies to add the corporate.
So they are the evil or the other powerful in terms of controlling, seemingly
very powerful forces.
And they are the full kind of critique.
And when I started
to examine how the situation is unfolding in
the Chinese ecosystem, I find that
the power of platforms or particular app stores are a bit more complicated, as
these are nested in the political and economic conditions
of the Chinese internet governance.
So, first as a bit of the background, the Chinese internet, of course, although
it developed fairly late, it is the 71st country that entered,
or has a stable global internet connection.
But by far it has received a very kind
of rapid growth in terms of a mobile population.
So even though that the internet connection
or penetration rate is only slightly over 60%, but among all of the internet users in
China, almost all of them.
So this translates to a 932 million out of the 940 million access the internet through
mobile phones.
So we have a very large growing mobile internet population.
And therefore,
this means that China is also one of the largest in terms of markets, and in fact,
the spending or the whole scale of the industry has surpassed the United States back in 2016.
And it is also one of the free market that are free from the Apple and Alphabet duopoly.
So this is also, kind of, originated or formulated as a historical development
because Google has withdrawn its search engines from China back in 2010.
And this also means
that the Google play store is not readily available on
a lot of the domestically manufactured mobile devices, and therefore really gives
a space for third-party Android developers to flourish.
So in terms of the market structure,
we have very chaotic and also booming third party Android stores.
And as you can
see that, different players, so, ranging from the big platform companies such as
Tencent to mobile device manufacturer like Huawei and Oppo, they are dominating the third
party Android stores.
And all of these stores are not certified as the official Android.
So which means that
they are not preloaded with the Google suite of apps.
And Tencent so far is the
largest in terms of app store market share, so it has 26%, followed by Huawei and Oppo.
And if we're talking about the revenue shares, so in Apple or
Google Play stores, the revenue share is nearly 30% versus 70%, but in China, 50-50 is
the industry norm.
And when I was researching about the revenue share structure is
always very, it's not explicitly rated as in the Western context, and yearly, if you
are a big game developer, you will have a lot of negotiating power with the app stores
regarding distribution, revenue share, and basically, the whole
app store industry or economy is very different from the West.
And more specifically by focusing on Apple in China, we can look at, that China has
contributed roughly 20% of Apple's net sales, compared to the US which is 40%.
So China is fairly, has very large global markets
for Apple.
And when we're talking
about the revenue from iTunes software and also this category also includes the app store's
revenue.
So this stream has become increasingly important for Apple.
So by 2020, in annual report,
this generates roughly 20% for Apple.
And if we compare the Apple users versus the
Android users, because given the, kind of, the cultural and economic status that's
signified
by Apple, yearly iPhone users or iPad users, spent much more on apps compared
to Android.
And I think this is also reinforcing the current statistics on the spending patterns
on Android versus Apple.
So people tend to spend more on iOS and for all of the
Apple devices.
Even the regulation that's instituted by the Chinese governance,
all of the iCloud data is hosted on the mainland.
So this is one of the data localization efforts that is stipulated by the Chinese
government
through the cyber security law back in 2017, which means that any of the foreign internet
service or content providers have to partner with a local data collection and
hosting agencies.
So that data is, relatively kind of localized in mainland China.
And when we look at the app store economy and Apple's role in China.
So there's the
kind of background type way.
We're looking at any issue dealing with
internet governance in China.
And that is the overarching themes of China's cyber
sovereignty, and also the increasingly heavy handed regulation
that are imposed on the service providers.
So the role of cyber sovereignty, I think, is arguably getting more attention
and importance.
So it has this policy arranging, back in 2010 in a white paper called "The
Internet in China."
And also interestingly in this document was the outcome of the Google
withdrawal from the Chinese internet back in 2010, where the tension between US freedom
of information and freedom of expression versus the Chinese version of the sovereignty
and a regulation of internet really hiked.
So in this paper, you can see that the state has to really prioritize the public,
the responsibility or the state's security over individual rights to the internet.
And it also claimed that the Chinese government
plays a leading role in internet and administration,
and such principle is later reiterated in 2012 and 2013 as Jinping came to power.
So previously, the internet governance was really dispersed in multiple bureaucracies.
And has its problems of making the enforcement really hard, really a difficult task.
But as Xi come into power, there comes a wave of centralization of power.
So in
terms of the institutional set up, we have the cyberspace administration of China that
is formally established in 2014.
And this is a very top level kind of, regulation that oversees the
whole running and administration of the internet in China.
And this organization is
lead by Xi himself.
And also Li Keqiang, the premier.
So you can say this is a new,
kind of, policy-making body.
And you can see that it's getting increasingly
important
in instituting policies to regulate the Chinese internet.
And also another important venue
for it to showcase and [...] a vision of cyber sovereignty in the World Internet
Conference, so the Chinese version of Net Mundial or its own version of how
that should be governed collectively on the international arena.
So, the conference was fairly, kind of, old, back in 2014, but recently
it has a shrinking skill.
So previously, Apple CEO has attended this conference,
but in 2020 and 2021 with the COVID, the conference has not been put in place and
some of the legal principles, they rule out cyber sovereignty, which basically claims
that the cyber space should be governed as a
kind of a realm of the, such as land, water, or air.
So the legal principle was also further
insured in the cyber security law that came into play in 2017.
So under this framework,
my study delved into the regulation or the interplay between states
and Apple app store in China.
And there are three processes or three vantage points
that the power of the platform is compacted.
So first it's through the app review process and app take down process.
And lastly,
it's about an episode between the conflict's leading internet platforms,
which is owned by Tencent and is contestation over Apple's revenue share rule.
So, let's
take a look at each.
So in terms of the app review, as the authorities that governing
the internet becoming more centralized and the government's really kind of playing
catch up in terms of the regulation since 2014.
So there are basically a lot of new regulations that regulate, keep
all these different apps and internet services in check.
So, Apple became the enforcer,
the de facto enforcer of this government licensing rule.
So one of the category of apps
that are game apps become heavily regulated since 2016.
So what the Chinese government said is that the developer must obtain a game registration
license, and that number has to be obtained by the state administration process, publication
radio, film, and television.
So this is a very, kind of, making the regulation really complicated
and strange.
So basically, if you want to publish a game, you have to partner with
either a state owned kind of media organization that focus on more the traditional administrative
media, or you have to partner up with a
press, basically.
So there are a textbook publisher, basically publishing or holding
the license number for the games, and in terms of the design of the game app, the state also
said that you need to have an anti addiction lens for the young players, and you have
to build that feature into the games.
So this, the licensing rules come into play back in 2017, but there was a loophole
that has not been, so which means that Apple has not effectively enforcing this
rule.
But in 2020 the state tightened or fastened the schools
on the enforcement of this rule, therefore Apple has removed
thousands of apps from the Chinese app stores.
[Dwayne Winseck]: Lianrui, I have to give you a heads up at time--
you're already a little bit over time.
So if you could wrap up within the next minute,
that'd be great.
Great.
Okay.
So, last thing is one of the key, kind of, you
can see that the power has been imposed by the state, and similarly our VPN and other,
internet content publishing and uptake of course has implications for free speech
and also constitutes as a part of the internet censorship more widely on the
Chinese internet.
Lastly, this episode between Tencents and Apple:
specifically, Tencent has this tipping
function on its WeChat public account and Apple
saying we're wanting to have a 30% cut of
the spending in-app, but Tencent restricted and
also suspended its tipping function,
which eventually led Apple to change its rule.
The revenue distribution on the item that's spent in the app, and
this rule applies globally.
So I think this also can tell us about the power
play that intersect between very powerful platforms, companies in a certain market
versus the so-called global platform giants.
So I'm happy to answer more or elaborate in the QnA.
Okay, well, thank you very, very much.
Lianrui, always fascinating
to listen to your presentations and to see you continuously follow the really
difficult threads that need to be followed to get a good handle on what's going on in
China.
All right.
Well, now it's my turn, and I have got myself
thoroughly flustered, bouncing back and forth, between different modes of connectivity.
I now have three screens in front of me, one to keep time, which has already
blacked out, one my big screen, so I can look at my PowerPoint, and then one my laptop,
so I can look at you.
So, really nice to see everybody and thank you for coming, and Sara
if you could just send around my PowerPoint again, I'd really like that.
If people could have that instead of sharing my
screen, I find it really helpful to just let
people have it at their side and they can follow along.
And so what I'm going to do
is I'll be going through my slides, just hitting the high points.
And a lot of the
slides are going to have some visualizations that give you the, kind of, let's say they
give you the evidence for claims that I make.
And I'll just like, skip over them with the understanding that you can go and
look at them when you want, and we can talk about them later.
So, but, you know, the
whole raison d'être of this panel, I mean, two years in, you know, this has been
two years in the making, and in that two years, I mean, it seems like that the idea of platform
regulation is constantly being on a high boil. One can't get any sleep, really, if you're
trying to follow this.
And, I mean, so extensive are these activities that Manuel Puppis and I, two years ago, or
a year and a half ago, said, oh, somebody ought to keep track of everything that's going on
so we can keep our heads straight.
Well Manuel and I took this on, and that list
now is close to a hundred items long. Right here in Canada,
we've got C-10 next now on a high boil.
This was teed up a year and a half ago by the BTLR
report.
We've got consumer privacy protection act, online harms legislation coming down
the pipe, and a Senate bill on restricting on people's access to adult content.
I was talking to people at Heritage.
They've got four different working groups, you know, one
on C-10, another on online harms, another
that's trying to adapt the Australian news code for Canada.
And then they're resuscitating
website blocking at the ISP level, which is, you know, this kind of whack-a-mole game
that gets played.
I mean, it's clear that GAFAM is under increased and intense
criticism, you know, policy regimes created in the 1990s and 2000s are
said to have enabled them to recentralize, to platformize, as David might say,
the internet, and to remake the internet essentially in their image.
And here and around the world, Google and Facebook's dominance in particular of
the ad driven business model, as Eddie Greenspon and the others at PPF wrote a couple of years
back, are a form of vampire economics.
Hence my reference sometimes to vampire squids.
That they are primarily responsible for the crisis of journalism and for upending
the media and cultural industries and for destroying democracy.
We look at our field and we see that many communication and media scholars are saying
that platforms are media companies, that debate oversoaring should be C-10,
not C-11, and free speech is premised on behalf on the belief that platforms are
broadcasters.
Since digital platforms are media companies, media policy should be our
north star when it comes to inventing a new generation
of internet regulation.
So that's the case against GAFAM, if you would.
Here's my case,
and it's definitely not a case in support of GAFAM, but rather to try to put things
on a completely different footing to reconceptualize
the lines of analysis and critique.
So my
critique is one that the contemporary
way of thinking about the platforms is historically
inaccurate or misleading or shallow. That to call them media companies
and especially broadcasters is sociologically and institutionally inaccurate and misleading.
That to claim that they are the primary cause of the twin crisis of journalism and
the media is empirically unsupportable by and large, although they have not been of any
help to journalists and their impact on the media industries, writ large, I
think, is more ambivalent.
I think we should be thinking a lot more about telecoms regulation as a potential model that
we can selectively pick from as a guide to a
new generation of platform regulation and
that is far superior to broadcasting regulation.
And then if we continue to go
along this line of, continually thinking about platforms as media companies
and broadcasting and broadcasting regulation
as a model, there are serious limits to our
analysis and significant and undesirable consequences.
So argument one: history matters.
You know, I'm coming at this as a telecom scholar, and
from the cultural industry school of political economy of communication.
And basically what
the cultural industry school says is that the modern media industry is, since the mid
19th century, have developed in very close proximity to the vastly larger telecommunications
electrical equipment manufacturing and
banking industries.
Okay.
So I think that's where we need to start.
The second, you know, here's a nice little image here, I'm on slide eight.
Media history
is tightly intertwined with big tech, and there's
lessons for platform regulation.
Sure, we might score some victories if we focus on platforms that broadcasters and content,
regulation, but we're really going to seriously damage our understanding of that longstanding
historical relationship between the much larger telecom and IT sectors and the media and cultural
industries.
And we're going to be completely blinded to alternative approaches to platform
regulation.
Next slide.
Here's an area that I think is absolutely fascinating.
And every time I go back into it, my mind is just completely blown.
You know, if we look in the 1920s and
the 1930s, and the development of the radio broadcasting and film industries within North
America, who is the lead player in this?
It's AT&T and something called the Radio and
Electrical Group consisting of massive electrical equipment manufacturers
like GE Westinghouse, RCA, and so on.
And they're active, not just in North America, but also in the UK.
And, in Europe, in
in the UK, six of these electrical equipment manufacturers set up the original British
Broadcasting Company, which is then nationalized
four years later to become the British Broadcasting
Corporation.
We only see AT&T leave the industries, the broadcasting industry
as part of an agreement with these other players and under forceful regulatory kind of oversight
and threats of intervention from the SCC at the end of the 1930s.
In terms of, you know, our platforms, media companies.
Sure.
They do a lot of content
moderations, they absolutely are not mere conduits or neutral
platforms.
They are involved in content aggregation and automated decision making at scale and speed,
and these are crucial, but this is not equivalent to what we know from three
or four decades of the sociology of media, sociology of news production.
And it's not at all like commissioning, licensing, owning, publishing, scheduling, and creating
a catalog of book, film, TV, music, and game titles as the cultural industries would
tell us.
Yes, their spending on content has gone up in recent years, but as a fraction
of their own activities, it is tiny, it's minuscule.
It hardly shows up.
It's around 1 to 5%, depending upon the company that you're
looking at versus 50% to two thirds of all expenditures at, say, a Disney or a Viacom.
It's just not core to who they are, what they do, their identity, their culture.
And as the French regulator, ARCEP noted, social networks do not select each item of content
published on a service or carry out selection prior to the publication of content.
I think it gets it right when it says platforms are information organization systems.
I want to make sure that people understand that I don't object to calling Netflix, though, a
media company.
So claims that platforms are destroying journalism and the media, I think,
are very wide of the mark.
There definitely has been four sectors, all advertising-based, that have
seen their revenues decline since 2008.
Why 2008?
Well, 2008 was the year of the great financial crisis when advertising spending
across the economy fell off a cliff.
Okay.
We see newspaper circulation levels, and nobody
talks about this in the Public Policy Forum or in Shattered Mirror,
for example, it's
been falling off a cliff since the 1950s on a household basis, the 1980s on a per capita
basis,
and since the 2000s, in absolute terms.
Basically, after advertising revenue fell off
a cliff in 2008, what we see is a downward pressure.
You see that advertising spending
is shrinking or stagnating, and Google and Facebook are emerging and consolidating their
dominance at precisely this period.
So what we see is that traditional media companies are
battling the global internet giants
over a shrinking advertising pie.
Hence all of the concern.
Okay.
Blaming Google, I think,
also ignores a quarter of a century of self-inflicted wounds from excessive
mergers and acquisitions, financialization, and unsustainable debts.
And in Canada, grafting the media and cultural industries onto telephone companies that
don't know a bloody thing about running media companies and these immediate sectors or divisions
within these companies are subordinated to the real engines of these companies, which
is selling mobile wireless services and broadband internet access services.
They couldn't give a damn about media content services, and the media content services'
profit levels within these companies is half that of their pipes division.
So their fiduciary
obligation is to maximize profits, so where should they focus?
Of course they should focus
on the pipes, and that's where they do, hence the neglect.
And this is structural and it is core to the Canadian media industries.
A quick photo of,
look at advertising spending as a percentage of GDP.
I want to keep going on.
All right.
The key thing here is most media sectors are not supported by advertising, they're based
on subscriptions and direct pay.
The pay per media sectors outstrip advertising by a five
to one ratio in Canada, three to one in the United States.
They are the engines, they are growing fast.
Here are some quick pictures to show this content
media, next page, looking at slide 16.
Look at network media as whole.
We see massive,
massive growth.
Do Google and Facebook dominate?
Absolutely.
In some areas, online search, Google's
dominance is absolutely clear and it is buttressed
by this massive vertical integration.
Now here's an area where regulators could dive in and start to talk about things drawn
from telecommunications regulation that go all the way back to the 1910s and 1920s, breaking
them up, structural separation between different layers in the internet stack, requiring Google
to hive off its vertically integrated ad stack as well as its control over audience data
from its top level service offerings.
We look at Facebook, massive growth.
Here, there's no doubt about it. Between it and Google,
they now dominate 80% of online advertising in Canada and their consolidation is
tightening over time.
Not lessening.
We can see this in the next slide, page 19, they net,
the big two now account for 80% of all online advertising.
Sure, sure, then.
GAFAM has carved out a big spot for themselves.
Google and Facebook
are now the fifth and seventh largest entities in the network media economy, Canada
respectively.
Netflix accounts for over half of the online video services market.
But think about this, the top six global internet companies' share of revenue in Canada
is 10%.
It's big.
It's growing very fast, but it's only 10% of a $90 billion media economy.
The big five Canadian companies, in contrast, control 75%, three quarters of that $90 billion
economy.
Bell alone has revenues that are nearly three times that of GAFAM and Netflix
in Canada.
Here is a visual representation on slide 22.
To just show the size of each of these companies.
Argument four: we
need to go back to telecoms regulation.
Why?
It takes it back further in time, takes us
back to the middle of the 19th century.
When we see the consolidation of industrial capitalism,
the rise of regulated capitalism, the rise of the industrial media and the relationship
between the media industries, telecoms, and the IT industries,
it's also the moment when communication studies as a field begins to kind of emerge out of
sociology and an economic history and economics sociology.
So our intellectual origins of
the field rest in this area, and they are struggling to come to terms with that, with
these new formations: industrial media, the cultural industries,
and their relationships
to these other sectors of power in society, not just political power, but industrial power.
Telecoms regulation also offers us bright line ex ante rules.
That is, the rules of the game are set into place beforehand.
Okay.
Sara, can you
give me one or two more minutes or no?
[Sara Bannerman]: Yep, but you are over time.
Okay.
I will
wrap it up real quickly.
Okay.
Media policy doesn't have a monopoly on normative values,
telecoms policy highlights control over economic power, social inclusion, and participation
to universal affordable service,
freedom of expression via control over gatekeepers via common carriage, net neutrality, strong
data, and privacy protection.
Okay, next slide, there are four major kinds of principles
or cornerstones of telecoms regulation: structural separation, firewalls, public obligations,
public alternatives that I think would be a really good place to start. Going quickly
now, the next three slides are just a list of countries and some of their structurally
oriented inquiries that you might want to look at.
Going to the very last,
second-last slide.
And I won't go through all of this, but here's my laundry list of what
goes wrong if we start to build our pivot for understanding how we should be developing
a new generation of internet or platform regulation.
Our history is shallower,
and it should be deeper.
We turn a blind eye to other sources of media power and concentration
and consolidation.
I mean, the amount of inks built on the platforms and regulation and
the fact that nobody, nobody is focusing in on the Rogers and Shaw merger, the sixth largest
merger in Canadian history drives me absolutely bananas.
Okay.
The idea that, you know, all the focus is on content regulation versus structural
regulation also drives me bananas, as well that we are now in the process
of universalizing the exceptional and restrictive standards of broadcasting regulation set in
the early to mid 20th century and applying it to all forms of mediated communication, I
think is regressive in the extreme.
No other media is subject to as strict and restrictive and low standards of
expressive rights protection than broadcasting.
And this is what we are now set to
universalize.
Okay.
I think this is a real mistake.
Okay.
And last, whenever we look
at the Australian, you know, digital platform inquiry, the Butler inquiry, the CRTC, they
wander off into all sorts of areas about, you know, trusted and verifiable news sources,
disinformation, misinformation, and they lay the responsibility almost exclusively
for the lawful, but awful speech at the feet of the platforms.
Last point.
The assumptions underpinning a lot of this discourse are based upon omnipotent
media effects, assumptions which have been completely discredited, but over a half
a century of research, we need to go back to the drawing board.
Thank you for indulging
me in going overboard and over time.
Okay, well, thank you.
So now we have some questions and, you know, I'm here
to take questions, but we can also, you know, Sara, if you can give me a hand because I
really have gotten myself, kind of, you know, out of whack by looking at these multiple
screens and the extent to which I had to scramble to get caught up, it was pretty disconcerting,
but I'll do my best, but.
[Sara Bannerman]: Sure.
Well, why don't we invite participants
in the session to, well, anyone on the session, on the call to put any comments
or questions in the chat, and we can, call on them from there.
While we're waiting for that, are there any questions for some of the presenters for each
other?
Or comments, and if not, then, I guess, okay.
We've got one question
in, okay.
They're coming into the chat now.
The first question, there's two questions
here for professor Winseck.
How would telecom policy address new issues of AI data
and manipulative apps?
And another question is for professor Winseck,
how do you justify using the concepts of telecom regulation for GAFAM when it obviously
didn't work in Canada and led us to become one of the most concentrated countries
in terms of media with the vertical integration in Canada?
So I'll take both of those questions in order.
So, David, I think one of the really important things that we see
out of telecoms regulation is the idea that it has always been focused on opening up the
black box by looking at the terms and conditions of device interfaces, network interoperability
in interconnection, and technology standards.
I think that's a really important lever that we can now adapt and apply in this domain.
And I think we've also, the possibility of strong privacy and data protection.
I mean, the flip side of common carriage is to ensure the, kind of the sanctity of the
privacy of people's correspondence.
So I think we get that right there
in the manipulative apps, again, opening up the design.
This is fundamental, and that was fundamental to why AT&T was pushed out of the movie
industry, pushed out of the radio industry, and restrictions put into place, firewalls
put into place in Canada that kept until the mid 1990s, Bell and the telcos out
of the content industries.
And that goes to, Catalina's question, you know.
Basically, I say we rewind and undo the mistakes that were made from the raw years of the 1990s
that were, you know, the exact same years that led us to the .com bubble and collapse.
And we realized that that was a fool's errand.
We made a mistake and we left a lot
of good tools unused and on the table.
And I think when you look even at more recent CRTC chairs, like von Finckenstein,
he hugely regrets, and basically if you sit down with them, he offers a mea culpa for
basically buggering everything up by believing that vertical integration and consolidation
would be essential to allowing Canadian firms to bulk up and effectively compete
in a new era of globalization.
So they, the regulators themselves admit their mistakes.
We see that coming out of
the competition bureau and for the last 12 years, we've seen successive
Liberal and Conservative governments.
And here, you know, we're talking mainstream politics, not even on the kind
of more progressive and radical edges, basically trying to unwind mistakes.
But what have we got?
We've got these powerful companies that are pushing on every single
lever to protect their interests.
And of course, when they've got 40% profits on, you know,
$70 million, $70 billion, they have a kind of power to basically hold back the tide.
I'm just going to suggest that we extend the session by about five minutes since we did
start a little bit late, to give us a couple more minutes for questions.
And I had a question for Dana at the same time.
I also want to highlight before
we get to the very end that we do have another session coming up at 1:45,
so there's a short break between the end of this session and the start of the next one.
If anybody does need to leave a little early or, you know, in the next few minutes
to get to their next session, obviously you can feel free to do that.
The links are
in the Zoom document.
My question was actually just to kind of confirm, Dana,
that I understood what you were saying.
It was so interesting, and it was really beyond my knowledge of what's
going on with 5G right now.
Did I understand you correctly in saying that basically,
there are new technologies now that just can't be run on the, on TCP/IP and need these kind
of extensive efforts to kind of bleed over into HTTP and whatever?
And that there there's this need for new protocols
that's going to, basically, mean there'll
be multiple different protocols and it's not going to be kind of like an end-to-end
system anymore?
So is that kind of what you were, The gist of what you were saying?
I'm glad that that did come across.
Thank you for your question.
So, yes, there are technologies that are being
spurred out at the moment.
The main issue is that the terabytes per second data transfers,
no matter how much fiber you have in the world, you could even put fiber, kind of like
a Matrix style, that goes into the back of
people's heads, it wouldn't be enough because the processor of the internet
protocol is not providing enough latency.
We do have options at the moment with
the TCP/IP protocol, that it gets segmented into two areas being TCP, which has confirmation
codes to ensure that the message is always sent and received in the same process.
Whereas for example, us right now on Zoom, there's a second called user datagram protocol.
It was originally made for telephone calls, and it's important, and
it just, its relevance now during COVID cannot be overstated.
At the moment, the big
issue that industry's looking to accomplish is to have holograms into the market, that
people will have individual holograms, to be able to meet, have virtual calls in your
living room, sitting down with one another.
That's the next big push.
As well as, too, there is conversations in the food industry,
to have these, from what I understand, it's a helmet that you would wear and receive
sensors and magnetic pulses to make it seem as though you've eaten a certain food.
And they're looking at that as well as another area, but holograms are the next kind of big
app that they're looking to push, which TCP/IP does not support and
would need a new protocol suite.
That's fascinating.
I had a question for Jonathan there, and, you know, Jonathan, excuse me, cause
I was popping in and out of your thing, but you set up, early on, kind of, three different
potential kind of sources of regulatory inspiration, platform governance inspiration,
if I remember correctly, and you put a lot of emphasis on DeNardis' view
about, you know, how platforms themselves have become the real centres of
of platform regulation.
And so, I'm wondering how you feel about the reach towards broadcasting regulation
in contemporary policy moves.
And, you know, my gambit here to say,
let's throw it down another rail, you know, I'm not saying, you know, let's
just transpose telecoms regulation, you know, onto the platforms, but I'd say,
man, there is a lot of, you know, really, really valuable resources here, conceptual
resources, experience, history that we can draw to bear.
So what do you, what do you think?
Thank you for the question.
Yeah, I know I've,
in my own presentation, I sort of rushed a little bit at the end through the normative
regulatory philosophy component.
And it's one of these things where I think we have
to ask this question, whose philosophy is directing the future of these industries?
Is it sort of a corporate philosophy that's very profit centric, that's driven by
the self-regulation that currently exists?
Or is it a normative regulatory philosophy
that comes from somewhere else?
Either the top down or the bottom up.
And certainly,
I mean, I was reading an article this morning about C-10, from, in the National
Post, and they were saying, you know, let's not, you know, we can all make our own
choices about the content that we consume.
Let's not put top-down limitations, like broadcasting
era type limitations on online providers.
And now this assumes of course, that the platforms aren't directing us in any way and that we
are free to choose the content that we want.
But that's, I mean, critical cultural scholars
have been arguing for many years now.
That's not the case.
I mean, manipulative design, profit-centric design, advertising
models built into these services, certainly direct our consumption behaviours in many ways.
So yeah, certainly, I would welcome top-down approaches, but there is this,
this nuance to doing it right.
And not limiting speech rights at the same time.
So it's a complicated thing to figure out.
For sure.
Any other questions that people, have for Lianrui or for David
or Dana?
I see another one here for me from Derek, but I'll hold off, you know,
to see if we've got some others, maybe we, you know, we don't have much time and I'll
quickly give an answer to Derek.
I started to type one in the chat box, but, you know, Derek,
my thought is, one,
you know, we need to really jig our hierarchy of priorities, here, we're spending
way too much time, on the questions of content, it's sucking up all the oxygen.
All right.
And, you know, yes, there are problems there, but I have two points that I want to
make about that.
One is I think a lot of those problems would be taken care of
with the kinds of structural and behavioural, regulation that I'm talking about in terms
of, you know, opening up the black box, maybe putting limits on, the extent to
which information can be hoovered up and mobilized for targeting audiences,
and by requiring high levels of information disclosure from the platforms themselves.
Okay.
So, and then, but then I would say also, my belief is that we need to have laws
like Nets ed, DG, you know, the German approach, right?
We need to formalize,
rules and law, but what kinds of content we want taken down as opposed to using,
pressure on companies to, you know, better their social responsibility by cleaning up,
you know, the awful but lawful content that's on their services.
I think this is a really bad way of going about things.
So I think we need to be very
clear and set out in legislation.
What kinds of speech is beyond the pale, and then
you know, regulate the companies according to those standards.
We can't use backdoors,
to achieve speech regulation that we can achieve through basically the
the institutional arrangement.