Broadcasting Reform in Canada: The Case for a Georgist View of the Audience Commodity

Background: The Government of Canada’s Online Streaming Act attempts to incorporate online streaming services into the “single system” of the Broadcasting Act. The legislation has been heavily criticized for a variety of reasons, and constructive debate has been hampered by the lack of a clearly defined policy rationale or public interest objective—in large part because the term “broadcasting” is ill-defined in the Internet context. Analysis: This article applies Georgist political economy to reinterpret Dallas Smythe’s concept of the “audience commodity” for the purpose of integrating emergent theories about the economics of attention and freedom of speech in the context of broadcasting and online media regulation. The principal argument is that a resource-centric view of human attention creates a technology-neutral conceptual basis for determining the scope of what is and is not media broadcasting. Conclusions and implications: The conceptual framework developed aligns the audience commodity concept with the contemporary business reality of content creators and helps draw some defining lines around the concept of “broadcasting” in the era of Internet platforms. Transitioning the fundamental basis for the definition of “broadcasting” from one of transmission methods to one of controlling the bottlenecks of attention would make it far easier to construct meaningful legislation in the public interest.