A very good story in IHT about how the media and teleom regulatory bodies are morphing across the world, with the changing landscape of converged services. Australia, Britain, Malaysia and a handful of other countries have merged their media and telecom regulation authorities; Hong Kong is about to join them...the nod of course is that telecom and media functions are converging. If the digital bits are broadcast over public airwaves, they follow one set of rules. If they travel over phone lines, they are subject to another. And if they start and end on the Internet, there are few rules. Hence the need.
But some experts warn against the dangers of combining too much power into a single body, saying a monopoly on regulation can be just as dangerous as a monopoly on markets.
Tim Kelly, head of the strategy and policy unit of the International Telecommunication Union: “My own personal view...is there are some dangers associated with converged regulators. Amidst the politicization of broadcasting regulation, you lose sight of some of the less glamorous issues in telecom regulation—like universal service, like interconnections, like numbering, like emergency calls. The average politician might not think they are very glamorous...You don’t always get efficiencies. You often get fights.”
The other side: the extreme case is South Korea, where broadcast and telecommunications regulation are separate. As a result, Korea has no commercial provider offering triple play.
Of course, in U.S. FCC has been doing double duty—managing broadcasting and wired communications—since it was created in 1934, so not much debate here.