Communications Bill Review

From Pirate Party UK Wiki

The government is holding a Communications Review for the Digital Age prior to a new Communications Bill. They are requesting responses until 30 June 2011. Responses are expected to be no longer than 5 pages.

Contents 1 External links 2 Questions asked 2.1 Q1. What could a healthier communications market look like? How can the right balance be achieved between investment, competition and services in a changing technological environment? 2.2 Q2. What action can be taken to facilitate greater innovation and growth across the wider competition regime, and how can deregulation help achieve this? 2.3 Q3. Is regulatory convergence across different platforms desirable and, if so, what are the potential issues to implementation? 2.4 Q4. What barriers can be removed to facilitate greater exports and inward investment and make the UK more globally competitive in digital communications? 2.5 Q5. What further market and regulatory developments would lead to widespread take-up of superfast broadband? What regulatory action would government need to take to make superfast broadband more readily available in a) urban areas; and, b) rural areas? 2.6 Q6. What are the competing demands for spectrum, how is the market changing and how can a regulatory framework best accommodate any rapidly changing demands on spectrum and market development? 2.7 Q7. How should spectrum be managed to deliver our growth objectives whilst also meeting our policy objectives of furthering the interests of citizens and consumers in relation to communications matters? 2.8 Q8. How should the UK engage on an EU/International level in relation to spectrum? 2.9 Q9. Is the current mix of regulation, competition and Government intervention right to stimulate investment in communications networks? 2.10 Q10. Are there disproportionate regulatory barriers to investment in content? If so, what are they and how can increased investment in UK content production be encouraged? 2.11 Q11. Should the core focus of public service broadcasting be on original UK content? 2.12 Q12. What barriers are there to innovation in new digital media sectors, including video games, telemedicine, local television and education? 2.13 Q13. Where has self- and co-regulation worked successfully and what can be learnt from specific approaches? Where specific approaches haven’t worked, how can the framework of content regulation be made sufficiently coherent and not create barriers to growth, but at the same time protect citizens and enable consumer confidence? 3 Other issues that can be raised

External links

• First step to Communications Bill on DCMS website.
• Open letter from Jeremy Hunt

Questions asked

The Open Letter asks these 13 questions. We should frame our reply round them.

At the moment, we are getting ideas to put in our final submission, so sign your suggestions with your signature in wiki markup (i.e. append -- ~~~~). nearer the closing date, we'll integrate those ideas into a coherent response.

Comments that aren't intended to go in the final submission should be italicised and indented. (like this paragraph).

Q1. What could a healthier communications market look like? How can the right balance be achieved between investment, competition and services in a changing technological environment?

Q2. What action can be taken to facilitate greater innovation and growth across the wider competition regime, and how can deregulation help achieve this?

Maybe we could say something here about how DRM reduces innovation by hindering interoperability? -- Cabalamat 01:38, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Q3. Is regulatory convergence across different platforms desirable and, if so, what are the potential issues to implementation?

Q4. What barriers can be removed to facilitate greater exports and inward investment and make the UK more globally competitive in digital communications?

Q5. What further market and regulatory developments would lead to widespread take-up of superfast broadband? What regulatory action would government need to take to make superfast broadband more readily available in a) urban areas; and, b) rural areas?

Consumers want faster speeds, and will be happy to pay for them if the price isn't too much. To help keep costs down, the government should not impose any regulations on ISPs that cost money. For example, any regulations in the Digital Economy Act should be paid for entirely by the rightsholders who have been asking for them, not by the ISPs or (indirectly) the internet-using public. -- Cabalamat 23:02, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

Network effects mean that superfast broadband is more useful the more people who have it. This means there is an economic case for subsidising it in rural areas or for people on low incomes. -- Cabalamat 23:02, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

Q6. What are the competing demands for spectrum, how is the market changing and how can a regulatory framework best accommodate any rapidly changing demands on spectrum and market development?

Q7. How should spectrum be managed to deliver our growth objectives whilst also meeting our policy objectives of furthering the interests of citizens and consumers in relation to communications matters?

Electomagnetic spectum is a natural resource whose extent is fixed due to the laws of nature. We should however make the best use of it. one way to do this would be to make some of the bandwidth freely available to devices using frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS), in order to maximise use of bandwidth. The regulations on what can be done on this bandwidth should be as light as possible (ideally none), except for specifying a maximum output power (e.g. 1 W). -- Cabalamat 23:20, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

Q8. How should the UK engage on an EU/International level in relation to spectrum?

Q9. Is the current mix of regulation, competition and Government intervention right to stimulate investment in communications networks?

Q10. Are there disproportionate regulatory barriers to investment in content? If so, what are they and how can increased investment in UK content production be encouraged?

People will invest in content if they think they can make a return on it. One way to make a return on it would be micropayments schemes, where anyone on the net can easily and frictionlessly pay anyone else a small sum of money. But to run a good, effective micropayments service, you'd need a banking license, which would cost more money than most startups could afford. So if banking regulations were relaxed (ideally completely) for micropayment services, this would encourage invetsment in new content. -- Cabalamat 00:13, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Q11. Should the core focus of public service broadcasting be on original UK content?

That should be one aspect of it. The BBC has a large back catalogue, which license fee payers have already paid for. This catalogue should therefore be available to all British people free of charge and with no technical restrictions (i.e. no DRM). The most cost effective way of distributing this vast quantity of data would be to use P2P software such as BitTorrent. Making this content in this way would have another desirable effect: it would give consumers more reason to want faster broadband, and therefore more incentive to pay more for it. -- Cabalamat 23:33, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

Q12. What barriers are there to innovation in new digital media sectors, including video games, telemedicine, local television and education?

Does anyone know how much, if anything, it costs for games to be PEGI-rated? -- Cabalamat 00:47, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Q13. Where has self- and co-regulation worked successfully and what can be learnt from specific approaches? Where specific approaches haven’t worked, how can the framework of content regulation be made sufficiently coherent and not create barriers to growth, but at the same time protect citizens and enable consumer confidence?

Other issues that can be raised

It would probably make sense to point out somewhere that the internet search industry is a much bigger one than the music industry, e.g. the market capitalision Google (just one firm) is bigger than the big 4 music companies put together. It dosn't make sense to harm a big (and growing) industry in order to protect a small and declining one, therefore any regulations that protect the record companies at the expense of internet search/recommendation/indexing companies will likely harm the economy. -- Cabalamat 01:57, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

We should also point out that copying data is the entire purpose of the internet and therefore attempting to stop unauthorised copying without shutting down the net will be both futile and costly. -- Cabalamat 01:57, 17 May 2011 (UTC)