Let’s say you have near-monopoly control of Internet access in millions of homes. All your retail rates are deregulated, because the regulator has identified a force that faithfully eliminates any market distortion: vigorous competition.

And yet, paradoxically, you can use your market power to eliminate competitors on the application layer of your network, since the regulator isn’t sure what unjust discrimination and undue preference might look like. 

You can also cap customer bandwidth any old way you prefer, which not only drives out competition but adds a nice chunk of change to your bottom line from the overage charges that none of your subs could possibly understand, especially after reading the formulas some math nerd provided in your online FAQ.

And let’s say your company buys a TV network. Oops. Since onliners now spend more time online than they do with TV, you ask the regulator to regulate your TV network a lot less than it used to on the grounds that Canadian content makes far less money than the U.S. programming you resell at a hefty markup.

Now, you know that cable TV was created in Canada not to improve the quality of regional signals (as in the U.S.), but to bring U.S. signals across the border that Canadian audiences were clamoring for; that hit U.S. programs made Canadian broadcasters wealthy; that the Canadian production community has long depended on U.S. “service productions” to keep crews working.

But lately you’ve developed a hate-on for U.S. programming and U.S. program distributors, especially of the new-fangled, online variety.

Exhibit A: Netflix. Showing no shame or scruples, Netflix is “invading” your video space in a massively unfair “assault,” “attack,” or “threat,” depending on what day it is.

Who could have seen this coming? Not the regulator, and not senior online managers, who all think that the web is TV on downers, that Web 1.0 worked out fine, and that nobody is seriously interested in watching low-quality videos of dancing cats or creating their own (shudder) unprofessional content.

No worries, you’ve taken a leaf from the music moguls, who blamed their stupidity on pirates and left it to a computer geek to show the way online. All you have to do is substitute “bandwidth hogs” for "pirates"!

But Netflix is a different kind of threat. Its fancy technical innovations are a threat—technology that streams content to over 400 end-user devices.

Its predatory pricing is a threat: $7.99 a month and a market cap of $13 billion. You can’t keep posting 80 per cent gross margins at those prices.

Its platform engineering is a threat: you lower your data caps, and presto, Netflix lowers its default bitrate, like stealing the money right out of your ISP wallet.

Its user interface is a threat. It’s just sickening.

Hey, remember the threat of the Death Stars 20 years ago? Great concept. Death rays beaming down from U.S. satellites threatening to destroy cozy cable-net monopolies in sports, movies, music, etc.

For that matter, remember radio in the 1930s? Graham Spry’s “the state or the United States!” Booyah! Lucky for you, the Deciders in Ottawa are still partying like it’s 1951, when Vincent Massey figured out that the great unwashed public should use TV to cultivate a taste for opera.

Sixty years later, we call the policy Canadian cultural content.

The tricky part is finding a problem for the policy to solve—and one that everyone can agree on. That’s why it’s so important to stick to airy-fairy abstractions: cultural sovereignty, programs of national interest, the “single” broadcasting system that unites us from sea to shining sea, blah, blah, blah. 

You tell the regulator and politicians the real problem is ensuring that viewers have enough Canadian content choices, on every platform everywhere, which they won’t if Netflix is allowed to run amok in the henhouse you built.

And the only way to protect Canadian consumers, and their right to more Canadian programming choices, is to greatly restrict their programming choices.

The Internet is a game-changer? Not in Canada, where the regulator thinks it’s just another series of tubes carrying sewage or whatever. The “starving artists” have decreed that a screen is a screen is a screen, so all those computers owe them lunch money too.

Or, in the immortal, recent words of a fellow mogul, “If it looks like a duck, it is a duck.” Doesn’t quack? No problem! This is Canada.

When they appeared before the House of Commons heritage committee last year, some of your fellow travellers set a fine example of how to co-opt consumers without a shred of supporting evidence—and apparently without feeling a thing.

“Companies that both create the content and distribute it will be able to maximize the consumer experience and remain relevant in the media landscape moving forward,” they pronounced. Vertical integration may not be good for business—but it’s good for consumers.

On the flip side, some participants in the committee hearings warned what would happen if Netflix and its ilk aren’t reined in.

The threats Netflix poses to everything and everybody, especially the little guy, were saved for last: “Finally, consumers will ultimately suffer, with fewer Canadian choices.”

Tug at those heartstrings, reduce the sum of human suffering, and the pols love it. Blow Netflix outta the water! What a bunch of suckers.

But what do you do if you’re the Canadian regulator? What if you don’t have the guts or the brains to figure out how to follow up the Commons committee’s recommendation to start a proceeding to look into whether Netflix should be regulated?

Say no more. Strike another committee, an external committee! All those execs come over from the first committee, having established their public-interest credentials, and end up at an invite-only, closed door, two-day meeting to figure out what they’re going to allow Canadians to watch on the Internet.

God, don’t you just love this country? Hand me the bill counter.

David Ellis, PhD, an educator, consultant and broadband evangelist, writes a blog, Life on the Broadband Internet. Alexandra Birukova, who is graduating in June with an honours degree in communication studies, works as a journalist and magazine intern, and is collaborating with David on projects related to digital media, fashion and genetics.

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