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The ongoing shift from the Trudeau Liberals’ attempts to regulate the Internet to the Carney government’s willingness to retreat from them became even more apparent last week, as Ottawa continued backing away from policies designed to tax some of the world’s largest technology companies. Mark Carney’s willingness to scrap some of Justin Trudeau’s most ambitious policies was obvious even during his candidacy for the party leadership last year, when he promised to cancel the carbon tax he once supported because it had become “too divisive.” That cannily neutralized the Conservative promise to “axe the tax,” which was a major plank in their platform, and helped Carney breeze to election victory in April. He followed through on the promise his first day in office, then a few months later ditched the three percent digital services tax which the Trudeau government had planned to impose on Internet businesses that profit off the personal data they gather on consumers. That removed a major trade irritant with the Trump administration, but it remains irritated by the rest of the Liberal agenda to tax and regulate the Internet because it targets mostly American companies. That includes the Online News Act, which applies only to the US digital giants Meta and Google, and the Online Streaming Act, both of which were passed in 2023. The latter has been snarled in court since then, however, by lawsuits from foreign streaming services, which the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission initially ordered to contribute five percent of their revenues to Canadian content. When the CRTC upped that to 15 percent recently, the Carney government stepped in and called a time out.

In a bizarre development in the legal action, a letter filed in court revealed that the government plans to capitulate and “eliminate the base contribution requirement on streaming services and to provide government funding to replace those contributions.” Identity and Culture Minister Marc Miller’s office, however, insisted that streamers will still be required to “reinvest” an unspecified portion of their revenues. The Wire Report,........

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