Designing a Coherent Framework for the Regulation of Internet Content
Against the backdrop of transforming patterns of content production, dissemination and use, as well as the changed governance landscape in the Internet age, this paper seeks to emphasize the point that media can no longer be taken as a self-contained policy domain reserved for the nation state. It raises awareness of the necessity for a broader understanding of the relevant societal and governance processes and sketches the new challenge to ensure a coherent regulatory framework for Internet content. In this sense, the paper seeks to address the question of appropriate forms of regulating Internet content and pleads for a recalibrated action in the domain of global media law and policy, in particular with regard to network neutrality and Internet filtering.
Media Policy Out of the Box: Content Abundance, Attention Scarcity, and the Failures of Digital Markets
Media policy debates are today marred by outdated and ultimately unworkable justifications for government intervention in media markets. Both proponents and opponents of such intervention have obscured the appropriate goals of media policy. Moreover, they have paid insufficient attention to the impact of digital media on the marketplace of ideas. This article proposes a new account of media policy goals and offers the first detailed analysis of how new media market dynamics should affect future media policies. Policies that promote greater diversity in video products, whether through regulations or subsidies, serve both reactive and proactive purposes. In its reactive posture, media policy aims to correct what I call narrow market failures. These are failures of media markets to deliver content that small audience segments desire. But media policy must also pursue a proactive agenda by supplementing even well-functioning markets. This proactive thrust responds to broad failures of the market to deliver media content that audiences might not currently desire, but promotes democratic discourse and social solidarity. This article shows how digital networks substantially affect both reactive and proactive media policy objectives. Existing media policies are premised on the mid-twentieth century reality of scarce content and abundant audience attention. But in the digital era, it is attention that is scarce and content that is abundant. Drawing on empirical evidence and theory from several disciplines, I show how this shift changes the narrow market failures to which media policy must respond and undermines past responses to broad market failures. I conclude by applying these theories to media subsidies, arguing that subsidies for a robust public service media are the proper channel for media policy in the digital era from both a First Amendment and practical perspective
Net Neutrality International: Towards a Co-Regulatory Solution?
Marsden argues for a 'middle way' on net neutrality, a term that is used to cover a wide spectrum of questions about the future of the internet, and that is the focus of regulatory scrutiny and legislation in Canada, the US and Europe. Marsden asks whether 'Lex Monopolium' should be allowed to become entrenched at the expense of an open Internet, or whether innovation and investment can be encouraged by relatively light tough co-regulatory principles, backed up by a knowledgeable regulator with powers to intervene whenever economic or social concerns dictate.