According to Bell’s hired-gun, University of Alberta economics professor, Jeffrey Church, “vertical integration is beneficial for consumers.” According to him and other briefs filed by the Big Four, consolidation is good for consumers and Canada because:
- it reflects efficiencies, spurs competitive innovation and is a global trend.
- telecom, media and Internet markets in Canada are “highly competitive.”
- our ‘small media economy’ needs a few deep-pocketed national champions to compete globally and invest heavily in innovation at home.
- instances of harm are mostly imaginary and few and far between.
- it helps keep “consumers . . . within the regulated system” (Shaw’s submission, p. 4)
Here's a link to all of the briefs filed.
The collapse of media conglomerates elsewhere, the evidence of market power above, and the fact that Canada has the eighth largest media economy in the world after France and Italy and just before South Korea and Spain, should raise an eyebrow or two about claims one through three. Claim four is false (see below), and the last one repugnant.
Many in the second tier and nooks and crannies of the media also challenge these claims. Telus, for instance, argues that the harms are real, not prospective. Buying program rights, for example, from CTV, the Comedy Network, TSN and two-dozen other channels, it argues, became a whole lot harder, and more expensive, after Bell Media took them over.
Access, a co-operatively run cable-system-cum-Internet provider in Saskatchewan, raises similar concerns. Those that have content, but not distribution networks – Astral, CBC, media workers – make a similar case, but point to how control over networks rather than programming rights can cause real world harm.
Periodic squabbles between Quebecor and Bell highlight much the same point, with Quebecor’s SunTV hobbled in equal measure by self-inflicted wounds and its inability to sign an acceptable contract for carriage with Bell. Just last week, the CRTC declared that Bell’s decision to move Shaw’s Cave TV service into the upper stratosphere of its offerings conferred an undue preference on channels Bell owned, and ordered the change to be reversed. If these pitched Goliath versus Goliath battles are regular occurrences, we can only imagine the problems that David is having.
While Bell, Shaw, Rogers and QMI operate their own online video services, they assert that congestion problems require them to manage traffic through usage-based billing and bandwidth caps, although such measures cripple rival online video distributors such as Netflix, Apple TV, GoogleTV and so on. Netflix, for instance, downgrades its services relative to standards elsewhere, and bitterly complains about having to do so, all the time. Smart and savvy telecom guys like Jean-Francois Mezei and rabble-rousing groups like Open Media are convinced that such practices are a deadweight on creativity, innovation, freedom of expression and an open Internet.
For the public, the practices just mentioned and networks that are under-developed and over-priced by global standards, constitute subtle yet pervasive constraints on how we use and experience the emerging networked digital media. Stubbornly, Canadians lean against the wind and remain heavy Internet users, downloading and uploading to and from YouTube, virtuously contributing to Wikipedia and watching porn at rates that rank at the very top by global standards.
All this, too, despite the fact that, as Shaw’s brief repeatedly states, the industry and regulators are one when it comes to the goal of keeping “consumers in the existing broadcasting system.” We can only imagine what things might be like if they strove for the maximum freedom of expression possible, rather than only “as much diversity as practicable,” as the CRTC puts it.
Ultimately, the problems of fully integrated media conglomerates are congenital, not imaginary. They run hand-in-hand with media history the world over and until we accept that, we’ll have to continue settling for scraps off the table as regulators let the Big Four, I mean, the market, rip.
Dwayne Winseck is a communications professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University in Ottawa. Prof. Winseck been researching and writing about media, telecoms and the Internet in one way or another for nearly 20 years. You can read more comment on his blog, Mediamorphis. His column will appear every second Tuesday.
