Hey-o! It’s your friendly neighbourhood internet law commenter, back after a flurry of year-end posts to his much more normal one post every 3 months schedule. But with the government proposing a “law” about the “internet” I guess I really need to write about that. Let’s get news-y!
Clearly free expression
I’ve got some catching up to do in my posts. I’m on fire now! Three in two weeks! (-ish).
I’m still thinking about what to write!
Sometimes you have have a lot to write about and sometimes you have nothing to write about. This is one of those times. So let’s write about all of it. And none of it.
As the summer winds down, we’ve been feeling kind of philosophical. What does it all mean, and all that. As a practicing lawyer, I tend to focus on the little picture. We’ve got a problem, it relates to one thing, we try to solve it. FOCUS, dammit. That translates to the way I’ve written here at AM.com. A new piece of legislation passes, an interesting court case comes out, some government body releases a report, and we write about the minute details of a very small slice of law and the internet. We’ve never really looked at the big picture and the big issues. Until now.
Yes this is Stephen Harper. That's the point.
On Friday (news dump day), the Conservative government announced their choice to replace Konrad “The Killer” von Finckenstein as head of the CRTC, starting June 18th. His name is Jean-Pierre Blais, and he’s… some guy. He’s a lawyer (ugh), and he has held high-level government positions at the Treasury Board, Department of Canadian Heritage, and even the CRTC itself. So, lifelong bureaucrat. Here’s the money blockquote from the article linked above:
Telecom insiders predict Mr. Blais, 51, is more likely to anticipate and comply with Conservative government policy leanings.
Looks like Harper got himself a yes-man. Don’t get me wrong, this guy has experience in the CRTC and was its general counsel, so he understands the issues. Doing something about those issues that benefits the people of Canada instead of the giant media corporations? Well, we’re gonna have five years of this guy to answer that question.
I am a lawyer specializing in internet law working out of Montreal, though sometimes I do it in front of the U.S. Capitol. That should tell you what you need to know about internet law in Canada. I also warp young legal minds at the Faculty of Law at McGill.
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