Canada's Bill C-11 and its impact on Canadian content creators (including libraries as content creators), and Audience

 REFERENCE:

Gonez, B. (June 6, 2022). Canada’s Bill C-11: What it could mean for creators and discoverability on YouTube [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKEGnAo4Eqg

 

This Youtube presentation originally published by Canadian journalist Brandon Gonez outlines a new legislative bill in the process of being officially made law in Canada. 

 The bill is being titled The Online Streaming Act or BILL C-11, and has the potential to affect the level of control content creators have and how audiences in Canada will be able to interact with content (Gonez, 2022). The passing of this bill can also mean that the CRTC will have the authority to exert control and influence over content and recommendations to push Canadian content onto Canadian based viewers, therefore limiting their ability to discover global content, and restrict global audience reach for content creators (Gonez, 2022). 

In an interview with Todd Beaupre, the director of product at Youtube, he stated that recommendations on YouTube play a crucial role in audience reach, discoverability of new content and how creators are able to monetize using the platform (Gonez, 2022). he even uses a library as an analogy to say that YouTube functions as a librarian and gatekeeper, assisting viewers in finding content and creators they want to watch and like while remaining largely impartial (Gonez, 2022). If this bill now becomes officially a law, that dynamic will all change, creating a bias in how the platform is meant to function (Gonez, 2022). 

For a moment, if we consider how libraries actually use digital platforms, we could imagine a similar scenario. In recent years due to COVID, libraries have made use of the platform to generate informative video content for programming, branding, and as a news outlet for patrons. If this bill does become law, it could mean patrons will have less control over access to library content from around the world. Yes, supporting Canadian libraries is a good thing, but both patrons, students and libraries should not have a regulator from Youtube via  the CRTC influencing how they search for content or creating a bias for content viewable on the platform, making it harder to search. Content will end up being mismatched with audiences, and affecting the level of interests and likes etc. that can play a big role in supporting creators. We all know that at a library, the last thing a librarian wants is to misdirect a patron to content that is not right for them based on their needs and wants. 

The same scenario can also be applied in theory to digital collections at a library. if a library wanted to create a digital YouTube collection of videos that include content from other countries, the same issues will arise. 

Ultimately these scenarios are created  ONLY IN THEORY, but the impact of this bill is quite real.