CBC Budget Cut? We Asked for It.

Facebook just spent a billion dollars on a tiny little internet startup called Instagram.

Meanwhile, our own beloved/celebrated/maligned/despised CBC is figuring out how to suffer through a $115 million budget cut.

650 people will lose their jobs at the CBC, and at least 6 programs will be cut.

Instagram, on the other hand, only employs 13 people. They were all just made instant millionaires.

Okay, I get that the trials and tribulations of a national public broadcaster are very different from the success of a private firm that has experienced a high profile aquisition. That’s very much an apples-and-oranges story.

But that’s not the story. The story is us.

Porn Industry Getting a Free Pass?

I’ve spent some time trying to research various aspects of the global pornography industry, but have managed to learn very little about it. Most statistics published are either unsourced, or very outdated.

A page on TopTenReviews.com (Internet Pornography Statistics), for example, falsely claims to offer porn stats up to this year, but simply features a collection of stale data that seems to have been lifted from a second web site (Pornography Statistics), Family Safe Media, a reseller of “parental control solutions.” Family Safe Media lists their sources, but states” “Statistics are compiled from the credible sources mentioned. In reality, statistics are hard to ascertain and may be estimated by local and regional worldwide sources.”

The only real research into porn seems to be performed by a UK-based firm called Juniper Research, in a category they term, “Adult Content.” Not even Neilsen in North America is performing any analysis on the porn industry, despite the fact it clearly represents a considerable sliver of the media consumption pie.

All this leads me to wonder: has the porn industry been granted a free pass? Who is monitoring its progress, its content, and its influence, in North America? Is anyone evaluating its economic, social, and cultural impact? From what I can see, porn exists among us as a force we all like to turn away from, almost fearful of its prurience; or is it more that we have accepted porn as a core value of contemporary society?

Could Porn Fund Canada’s Internet?

Two interesting pieces in the news today.

First, from Japan: porn traffic is flooding the country’s mobile high speed internet (Porn Downloads Strain Japan Phone Network, Prompt DoCoMo Curbs). While the entire piece is very interesting, one piece of information stuck in my mind: the porn industry is worth about $3 billion in Japan alone.

Now cut to Canada, where the CRTC begins hearings into Net Neutrality today. While a variety of organizations are arguing against control of data traffic by the country’s largest ISPs, those same ISPs are complaining about the cost of running their networks, hence the requirement to control traffic.

No doubt Canada also has a healthy porn industry and no doubt a significant amount of its value is born by the very bandwidth that ISPs want to control and other organizations want to set free. So, in a similar fashion to the taxation of another bad habit–tobacco–why not fund Canada’s internet through a new tax on porn?

Assume that Canada has a roughly equivalent porn industry value to that of Japan, about $23 per capita annually. That provides an economic base of about $764 million to the government. Now, assume the government taxes porn at a rate roughly equivalent to tobacco; that would set a taxation and duty rate of just about 100%.

That gives the ISPs about $764 million annually to subsidize our national internet infrastructure.

I’m no proponent of porn, but it’s also a minority of Canadians that smoke (about 20%). And while it may not be the perfect solution, it’s one that won’t degrade service to Canadians or increase costs.

The quality of the Canadian internet infrastructure is getting embarrassing and something needs to be done other than the proposed eviction of Net Neutrality from our borders or an increase in the already ridiculously expensive fees we already pay.

who said this?

This is music to my ears, as a resident of the Yukon:

“That means updating the way we get our electricity by starting to build a new smart grid that will save us money, protect our power sources from blackout or attack, and deliver clean, alternative forms of energy … It means expanding broadband lines … so that a small business in a rural town can connect and compete with their counterparts anywhere in the world.”

This is just what the Yukon needs to haul its economy and infrastructure out of the 20th Century!

Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with us, or even with Canada.

These are the words of US President-elect Barack Obama and they come from his stimulus plan for the American economy.

Considering that the Yukon’s premier is a well-known luddite, I’m guessing Obama’s plan sounds like pure fantasy to him. A similar plan from Fentie would probably just include subsidies on axe purchases and deals on fax toner.

Suddenly, I’m enamored of a US leader.