Abstract
This article examines the legal and normative foundations of media content regulation in the borderless networked society. We explore the extent to which internet undertakings should be subject to state regulation, in light of Canada’s ongoing debates and legislative reform. We bring a cross-disciplinary perspective (from the subject fields of law; communications studies, in particular McLuhan’s now classic probes; international relations; and technology studies) to enable both policy and language analysis. We apply the concept of sovereignty to states (national cultural and digital sovereignty), media platforms (transnational sovereignty), and citizens (autonomy and personal data sovereignty) to examine the competing dynamics and interests that need to be considered and mediated. While there is growing awareness of the tensions between state and transnational media platform powers, the relationship between media content regulation and the collection of viewers’ personal data is relatively less explored. We analyse how future media content regulation needs to fully account for personal data extraction practices by transnational platforms and other media content undertakings. We posit national cultural sovereignty—a constant unfinished process and framework connecting the local to the global—as the enduring force and justification of media content regulation in Canada. The exercise of state sovereignty may be applied not so much to secure strict territorial borders and centralized power over citizens but to act as a mediating power to promote and protect citizens’ individual and collective interests, locally and globally.
Highlights
Canada, like other countries, faces regulatory challenges posed by an increasingly networked environment in which everything is connected and in which power increasingly resides in global corporate agencies and online platforms
A recent government-commissioned report speaks of upholding core values associated with national sovereignty and citizen rights: supporting our democratic values that allow for both inclusivity and diversity, realizing the promise of advanced technologies to benefit Canada’s economy, and building a culture that embraces a connected life for all citizens, in a trusted and equitable environment
The regulatory space that Canada occupies with respect to media content is as revealing as the sovereignty it has refrained from exercising in recent decades
Summary
Like other countries, faces regulatory challenges posed by an increasingly networked environment in which everything is connected and in which power increasingly resides in global corporate agencies and online platforms. Various corporate apps and options fight for the attention of users, and seek to influence and dictate their choices through a highly diversified range of content offerings dominated by global platform operators Citizens used to this free-market range and often oblivious to the traps of surveillance and data capture are poised to resent government interventions, and certainly platform operators protest against any regulatory moves on the part of governments as protectionist impositions. Another challenge to revising communications law and policy is that borders between different legal regimes that have traditionally operated in relatively distinct spheres (i.e., telecommunications, broadcasting, competition, privacy, consumer protection) are quickly dissolving. Traditional notions of statehood and territory need to adjust to the reality of new connectivities and interdependence
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