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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.

In recent years, the million-channel universe has shifted into an oligopoly dominated by the likes of Netflix, Apple, YouTube, Spotify, Facebook, Crave, Disney and Amazon Prime. From a regulator’s point of view, it now somewhat resembles the limited set of legacy spigots that dominated the media landscape in the pre-web era. It doesn’t hurt that all of these companies distribute their content over cable and cellular networks that are themselves creatures of highly regulated oligopolies.

The central thrust of the report, which is hard to dispute, is that it’s time to end the piecemeal approach to media regulation represented by the Broadcasting Act, the Telecommunications Act, and the Radiocommunication Act, as well as the alphabet soup of associated agencies and funding programs. Unfortunately, the recommendations are so broad that they invite suspicion about whether the real goal is social engineering. Much of the report seems to consist of pointless virtue signaling. The word “Indigenous” appears more than 90 times, for instance — almost invariably as a complete non sequitur. The word “reconciliation” gets 12 mentions.