This article was taken from the January issue of Wired UK magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online "How do you manage to govern without controlling television?"
André Malraux once asked John F Kennedy. In marked contrast to the freedom of expression enjoyed in the US, European governments have strictly controlled the audiovisual media since their birth. The gradual expansion of broadcast market opportunities in the second half of the 20th century has thus involved one encrustation of regulation upon another on regulated entities, while technology-driven innovations such as BSkyB and Google have largely escaped regulation, except via competition law.
Some rules have been ditched along the way. However, many rules remain that will be almost completely out of date when the analogue world of scarcity gives way to the digital world of plenty - a process which has caused irrevocable decline in the traditional revenue oligopolies that paid for these regulations and for their regulators. For instance, commercial broadcast content is tied by rules and restrictions that vary by day of week, over rights ownership, regional news, regional sourcing of programmes and independent production quotas.
If that's not enough, the commercial public-service broadcasters operate under different rules governing the amount and distribution of advertising, while ITV has its own special Contract Rights Renewal competition remedy to stop it getting too successful and big compared with the rest and, like Channel 4 and Five, is compelled to sell its entire advertising inventory. Similar and in some cases tighter restrictions apply to radio broadcasting. And, in the background, ownership restrictions hamper industry consolidation and condemn below-scale losers to a slow death.
The existing regulation of content and advertising is an onerous and unsustainable burden on these broadcasters and limits their ability to innovate and to develop new business models. The contrast with the BBC's financial strength, based as it is on the licence fee, is stark. Regardless of the BBC's own R&D, innovation has moved decisively into the hands of software companies and device manufacturers.
The Labour government made considerable progress in depoliticising decision-making through the creation of independent regulators (Ofcom and the BBC Trust) and this has helped sustain democracy. The Labour approach has also seen a much greater faith in market forces than in the "industrial policy" favoured by its predecessor. Now, I think that it is time to allow market forces to act entirely within the commercial sector and leave public service broadcasting to the BBC.
Claire Enders is the CEO of media consultancy Enders Analysis
Read other articles from the Rebooting Britain series - Tax people back into the cities - Teach kids to see in four dimensions - Exercise a green foreign policy - Open democracy to the online masses - Reinvent the way we live together - Live life as a lottery - Enact beta versions of new laws - Make carbon emissions hurt - Slash the universities and go virtual - Make policy using prediction markets - Transform cities into green jungles - Promote another crash - Ditch Twitter: it's dangerous for democracy - Encourage failure - Make education more flexible - Set government data (radically) free
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
