| Popis: |
Digital content, Internet Protocol (IP), Moore’s law and a move from dedicated hardware to software based systems and rights management are enabling convergence. Convergence can be thought of as occurring in three phases. In the first phase of convergence legacy market players have entered one another’s traditional markets and offered a range of services and service bundles to end users. In the second phase internet based applications and content have been offered by non-traditional players in the communications and entertainment markets such as Apple, Microsoft, Skype, Google, Hulu and Spotify. In the third phase, which we may now be entering, applications, services and content delivered via the internet replace existing platform specific services. Access platforms are likely to change, with fibre replacing copper; and cable (intermediate between fibre and copper), fibre and satellite progressively replacing terrestrial broadcasting. Mobile access will be enhanced, may see consolidation and will compete with copper access. Bundling of services by service providers is likely to give way to device based integration of applications by consumers, with personal devices playing a central role. The internet is at the heart of these transformations, both in terms of demand for enhanced access and “innovation without permission” in relation to applications and content. If these changes become widespread they will fundamentally alter the nature of competition with access to “platform independent” applications and content on the internet replacing competitive models based on access to infrastructure. In this paper we argue that current communications and media policy is a barrier to the next phase of convergence. Specific barriers to change include: 1) inflexible and inefficient spectrum allocations; 2) platform specific universal service requirements; 3) obstacles to the shut-down of legacy services and networks and the creation of new ones. We propose a number of ways in which regulatory policy needs to change. The long history of legacy networks and services and the institutions that have developed around them - over a century for copper based fixed telephony and over 70 years for terrestrial TV broadcasting - make the required changes challenging. The challenges go beyond the responsibilities of sector specific regulation and involve broader public policy and political choice. They also require a shift of focus from promoting competition within traditional value chains to allowing disruptive innovation. As John Maynard Keynes set out in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money the challenge may lie “not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.” |
