November 2020, Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, who introduced Bill C-10 and this bill has passed in todays morning. This is actually aims to regulate programming distributed by media streaming services and social platforms like Facebook and YouTube, a measure that critics warn could infringe on individual speech. Moreover, is meant to subject tech giants to the same requirements as traditional broadcasters — effectively compelling companies like Netflix Inc. and TikTok Inc. to finance and promote Canadian content.
From yesterday, I got number of tweets regarding this bill and how to overcome this restriction. Most of the Canadians tweets to use a VPN and get rid of this. Is this an actual solution of it?
I actually like some Canadian tv shows — I suspect I’m spared most of the government funded junk TV by virtue of not living in Canada.
Probably not, using one of those $10/year or similar VPN services is rarely the solution to anything…but I don’t know how CRTC is proposing to implement this.
Typically, you only get to see bytes served from youtube.com/netflix.com/tiktok.com going to an IP, which may or may not be reasonably approximated as humans. With TLS-ECH and CDNs that host multiple services, even that is going away. Your ISP may not be able to differentiate between GitHub and Wired - all they’d see is that someone on their network is trying to access a fastly (CDN) service … or a cloudflare CDN service and so on.
Will Canadian regulators require ISPs to block access to Google, Facebook, Fastly, Cloudflare, Netflix and others in case those CDNs don’t comply with some CRTC requirement to report/disclose user behavior aggregates in some shape or form, … will CRTC require individual user session logs to be streamed/presented?
In that case, using a VPN to present your traffic as being from a different country, will make your traffic subject to whatever is the legal requirement in that other country.
But, if you’re paying for netflix in canadian dollars, then these logs might make you subject to canadian policies regardless of where your IP appears to be from.
In short, I suppose what would definitely work would be to torrent everything over some kind of dark-web-like / tor-like p2p overlay network.