Commentary
In the 1990s, the internet was a nascent phenomenon and was an ungoverned wild west of interactive communication. This prompted the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to initiate a process in 1998 to determine if the internet should be regulated by the government. After spending a year studying the issue, CRTC commissioner Françoise Bertrand announced, “The commission does not believe that regulation of the new media would further the objectives of the Broadcasting Act.”
What the commissioner really meant is that they couldn’t figure out how to regulate the internet, though they dearly wanted to. The sole purpose of the CRTC is to regulate communications, and it went against the commission’s instinct to have such a large and growing platform sharing information without the steady hand of a government agency to guide it….