These days the complaints of unfair competition extend to newspaper publishers, who are desperately trying to reinvent themselves as digital services, scrambling to catch up with the migration of their advertisers to the internet. But the CBC has a powerful presence online, too, far exceeding its closest media rivals in Alexa rankings. And, as it does on television, the public broadcaster sells advertising online at CBC.ca, which puts it in direct competition with newspaper websites. The publishers protest that the publicly-funded CBC was never intended to compete with newspapers.
The solution to the CBC's "unfair" presence in media markets, one often proposed by the private media industries and their political supporters, is to either dismantle or privatize the public broadcaster by withdrawing its subsidies.
But a better resolution would be for the CBC to eliminate the main irritant and go advertising-free, not just on radio (something accomplished in the mid 1970s) but on television and online as well.
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