Are you trying to learn more about internet law in Canada? It’s hard to imagine what the world would be like today had the internet not been invented.

In a few short decades, the internet has revolutionized everything from politics to dating to publishing to commerce to banking, spawning multi-billion-dollar industries that didn’t even exist in the imaginations of the most insightful science fiction authors of the 20th century.

But the online world was for a long while a sort of digital wild west, a lawless place that governments are still trying to tame with laws, rules, and regulations. 

Internet law touches on the topics of cyberlaw, privacy law, data protection, contract law, intellectual property law, and free speech. Every website owner and e-commerce company needs to be aware of the laws.

But what is internet law? How do countries around the world use public policy to regulate the online behaviours of citizens when the internet, for the most part, essentially knows no borders? 

Intellectual Property and privacy law

It was back in 1995 when Newsweek magazine famously published an article about how the internet was nothing but a “trendy” and “oversold community.”

The article’s incredibly bad predictions included casting doubt on just how revolutionary the internet would be, the author calling it “baloney” and how online technology would allow for telecommuting workers, digital libraries, online classrooms and streaming city council meetings. 

The Newsweek article said online databases couldn’t replace daily newspapers and that his local mall did more business in a day than the entire internet did in a month.

Moreover, the author doubted the internet could “change the way government works,” while also claiming digital books would never replace hard-copy tomes because trying to read electronic books was an “unpleasant chore.”

Decoding Internet Legislation in Canada: Key Aspects

The article stated that what we now know as e-books, widely read on Kindle devices and iPads, would mean that the “myopic glow” of a computer screen would replace the “friendly pages of a book.”

The article concludes that the internet was lacking human contact and that crucial factors in human connection would be “relentlessly devalued” in an online world, which is perhaps the only thing the author got right in his predictions. 

Of course, the article being from 1995, it was before Amazon, Google, Facebook, Kindles, iPhones, and a host of other technological developments that belied nearly every claim in the now infamous Newsweek piece.

Funnily enough, five years later in December 2000, the Daily Mail Newspaper in the United Kingdom published a story calling the internet a “passing fad.” 

Internet law in Canada

The laws around telecommunications and electronic commerce are complex. Sometimes a company might take action that is recommended by a lawyer, but it comes back to haunt them from a public relations point of view. An example of this would be if a company is seen to be doing something anti-first Amendment (free speech.)

One of the most significant Canadian laws regulating the internet came about in 2014 in response to the dubious distinction the country had as a haven for email spammers. Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation, according to the federal government, came into effect in response to burgeoning piles of unwanted emails filling up Canadians’ inboxes.

Calling spam emails a “significant social and economic burden,” the country’s anti-spam laws sought to stem the tide of unsolicited emails and text messages being sent that often contain malicious links and viruses. 

Canadian Cyber Regulations: Mastering Internet Law

According to the Canadian government, prior to passing the anti-spam law, Canada had seven of the world’s most prolific “spamming organizations.” But within three years, only two of those remained in the country.

The country’s Spam Reporting Centre, meanwhile, gets more than 5,000 complaints a week about unsolicited emails, though spam text messages have become a big scourge of their own in recent years.

The legislation was apparently effective in significantly reducing the number of spam emails people in Canada received, while also reining in companies whose e-mail marketing schemes often indiscriminately sent out millions of unwanted email messages without regard for the people receiving them.

Internet users and legal issues

But while the anti-spam legislation has generally been seen as a reasonable and successful approach to combatting unwanted emails, it’s the Canadian government’s recent efforts to regulate online content that has stirred much controversy and criticism. The Trudeau government’s plan to combat “online harms” such as hate speech has been called a “serious threat to human rights in Canada.” 

Despite “noble” intentions on the part of the Canadian government, legal scholar Ilan Kogan wrote in an opinion piece for CBC News last year, that the policy being touted by the government resembles other countries’ ill-fated attempts at regulating social media content.

Though the legislation purports to combat “harmful content” including revenge porn, hate speech, terrorist propaganda, child pornography and calls for violence, Kogan claims the government’s plan is highly problematic and potentially unconstitutional. 

Internet platforms

It would require social media companies and internet platforms to monitor user-generated content and take “reasonable measures” to weed out and restrict access to harmful content posted online. It would allow people to label content as “harmful” and give companies such as Facebook a day to determine if it’s indeed harmful and in need of removal.

The proposed legislation threatens companies with huge fines for non-compliance, allowing for penalties of a percentage of a company’s global revenues or up to $10 million. According to Kogan, this could lead to Facebook getting fined more than $2 billion “per post.”

Internet law in Canada

The proposed law also raises “serious privacy issues, since it would give the government more power to surveil citizens’ online behaviour.

Despite the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guaranteeing the right against unreasonable search and seizure, the new law would give internet service providers the ability to monitor and store “potentially harmful content” and secretly send it to law enforcement without notice or a user’s consent.

For its part, the Canadian government claims the new legislation is part of its “overall strategy to combat hate speech and other harms.” While it acknowledges that social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are widely used by Canadians to stay connected with family and friends, it also claims there’s a mounting body of evidence showing the dark side of social media and its “significant harms.” 

Hate speech spread online and the harassment it induces, the federal government claims, disproportionate targets and harms already marginalized groups including Indigenous peoples, religious minorities, women, and gay, lesbian, and trans people.

In addition, social media is used by terrorist groups to radicalize and recruit extremists, which threatens “national security, the rule of law and democratic institutions.”

Harmful online extremist content

The Canadian government’s online guide to the proposal points to “real-world acts of violence” that resulted from harmful online extremist content, including the Quebec Mosque shooting in 2017, and the mass shooting in New Zealand back in 2019.

Moreover, the use of social media platforms has seen an explosion in so-called “revenge porn” and child exploitation, where intimate images can spread around the internet without the subject’s consent.

For their part, the government claims social media companies have the means to scrub their platforms of hateful and harmful content but do so only in a “reactive” rather than “proactive” manner.

By passing its new online harms legislation, the Canadian government claims it will be easier to catch criminals by requiring social media companies to get more proactive in reporting and removing harmful content. 

Of course, whether it’s to be believed or doubted, the Government of Canada claims the new online harms laws would deter and lessen the harms done by certain content online while preserving privacy and freedom of expression. 

Internet law conclusion

Below are some things that you might want to talk to a privacy law lawyer about:

• Copyright infringement
• Defamation laws and lawsuits
• How to protect your company in cyberspace
• Creating a data privacy disclaimer
• How to avoid scams and spam on your website
• How to deal with Federal Trade Commission (FTC) inquiries (United States)
• Reviewing a contract with a cybersecurity firm or insurance company
• Protecting your domain names
• Dealing with Supreme Court lawsuits related to hacking

Your Guide to Internet Law and Digital Rights in Canada

You might also want to talk to your web devs about understanding the modernization of the internet and the principles of net neutrality.

Emerging new technologies always present governments with challenges about how to legislate and regulate their uses to minimize harm and maximize their utility. The internet, no doubt, has presented policymakers with the most difficult task of effectively regulating a global electronic network that grows and evolves every single day.

The rise of political extremism and the internet’s role in stoking societal divisions has set off alarm bells around the world, and lawmakers everywhere are now tasked with trying to tame a wild technological beast whether their efforts are successful, unfortunately, can’t be judged in the present, and it will likely be up to future historians to make that call. 

We hope you found this article on Internet law in Canada useful.