Opening the door to the digital era: regulating Australia's future broadcast and new media industry

How should public authorities react to this or other technological developments? One school of thought seems to be that government must not stand in the way of the benefits which will accrue to humanity from significant technological advances. An extreme version of this is that the Internet, for example, is so sacred that the law must not touch it.

While it is impossible to predict the effects of digitalisation, it is appropriate to consider any likely developments, as far as we can see them. As I have said, public authorities quite properly have an agenda and they have ways to intervene to try to realise the public benefits.

Of course, public authorities could always do little or almost nothing. They could enable only the migration of existing broadcasters to digital and do nothing else.

If public authorities do nothing else about the consequences of digitalisation, its effects will be decided by market forces and by the existing regulatory infrastructure. This may not be at all desirable. The market is more likely than not to be dominated by a few players, perhaps domestic and possibly foreign. Will their interests be identical to the public’s?

Apart from leaving the issue to the market, the present raft of laws, regulations and polices may no longer be appropriate.

For example, any cross-media rules or restrictions on foreign investment, if restricted to existing commercial broadcasters only, may be of little public benefit. There is thus a need to review broadcasting regulation in the light of any significant technological development.

It is unlikely that nothing at all will change with digitalisation, streaming and other technological developments. It is possible that multinational firms will seek to gain even more influence. But there will also be scope for smaller domestic and foreign firms in providing niche services.

And larger multilateral firms may not have the influence we expect. While the AOL-Time Warner merger may concentrate in the hands of one corporation a wide range of delivery services, I suspect it will still have much the same content.

It seems that the digital spectrum, even if reserved for high-definition transmissions, will allow new entrants into the market. With cable, satellite and the Internet, spectrum scarcity, a pillar of broadcasting regulation, is being circumvented. But cable, much satellite broadcasting and the streaming of broadcasts through the Internet are not accessible without any noticeable cost to the viewer, unlike free-to-air TV.

In conclusion, I therefore suggest the following:

We shall regularly need to work out what are the likely scenarios resulting from technological change. We shall need to do this against the answers to three important questions.

First, what do we want to achieve, economically, socially and culturally? This will of course involve a reaffirmation of these ethical principles which should continue, notwithstanding the way in which the content is delivered to the public. As to other outcomes, it would be highly desirable that the answers to that enjoy a wide community consensus.

Second, what are the ways in which we as the public authorities of one state or jurisdiction (however defined) can still act unilaterally?

Third, what are the ways in which the public authorities of the region or the world can collaborate to achieve our ends?