Net Age Has No Place for Archaic TV Regulation

[Commentary] Culture that lasts, culture that lives, is culture that is close to a spirit of enterprise. In broadcasting, free enterprise has led to more choice and given people access to cultural experiences of every sort. Regulators, like television industry incumbents [in Britan], must learn to accept the new world of choice. At the Edinburgh TV festival Robert Pepper, formerly of the FCC, outlined the regulatory challenges in a world where traditional boundaries between television and the Internet have gone and where data storage and high-speed transmission eliminate ­scarcity. In this world, he asked: “What, if anything, gets regulated? And what does localism, diversity or pluralism mean?” As broadband Internet becomes more able to deliver high-quality video to the home, should we continue to have different regulatory regimes for TV and for other audio-visual content? The European Commission thinks so. Its proposals seek to preserve a more stringent regulatory regime for traditional broadcasting than for on-demand content. This approach is doomed. For a consumer, whether the image on their screen has come through a TV tuner or a broadband connection may soon be irrelevant. Differential regulation is pointless and arbitrary. What is the point of having complete freedom within the law on audio-visual content received through the Internet and strict codes, format controls or production quotas on content received through digital TV? The question then becomes, should Internet audio-visual content be regulated in the same way as television currently, or should TV increasingly be deregulated in the same way as the Internet? The new world also means that the demon of powerful media companies imposing their views on the world belongs to an old James Bond movie. It always was a bit of a myth, but now it is laughable. Nobody can seriously say there is a problem with plurality when there are hundreds of TV news channels, millions of news websites and weblogs, and the ability for citizens to access information in an unmediated way. Technology and the market are delivering the ultimate pluralism.
[SOURCE: Financial Times, AUTHOR: James Murdoch, British Sky Broadcasting]
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