YouTube, TikTok say Liberals’ online streaming bill would harm digital creators
Global News
TikTok executive Steve de Eyre said the federal Liberals' Bill C-11 doesn't just fail to protect digital creators from regulation, but makes them collateral damage.
Online streaming giants YouTube and TikTok are asking Canadian senators to take a sober second look at an online streaming bill that they say would cause significant harm to Canadian digital creators.
TikTok executive Steve de Eyre said in a Senate committee meeting on Wednesday evening that the federal Liberals’ Bill C-11 doesn’t just fail to protect digital creators from regulation, but makes them collateral damage.
He said the Senate should more explicitly exclude user-generated content from the bill, which was designed to modernize Canadian broadcasting legislation and bring online streaming platforms into the fold.
Senators should also consider rules around how Canadian content is identified, he said, saying much of the content that Canadians create on TikTok wouldn’t qualify as such.
The onus could end up on users to prove how Canadian they are, meaning that “established media voices and cultural voices” with more resources could end up at the front of the line, said de Eyre, who is the company’s director of public policy and government affairs in Canada.
YouTube executive Jeanette Patell told senators that the bill gives far too much discretion to Canada’s broadcasting regulators to make demands around user-generated content.
She said the provision that the regulator can consider whether someone has directly or indirectly generated revenue from the content would affect “effectively everything” on the platform.
“This is a global precedent,” said Patell, who is YouTube’s head of government affairs and public policy.