Parliament and the Internet Conference

Kip Meek

What I would like to do is to skip all the rhetoric on the wonders of the internet and dwell simply on Ofcom’s view on how it should be regulated. I should emphasise right up front that I am speaking here primarily as a content regulator. This doesn’t mean that I will ignore issues that some people would consider as being outside our core areas of expertise – digital rights management, grooming, commercial fraud. But it does mean that we – Ofcom – recognise that we do not monopolise knowledge or insight on the issues and the strong policy predilections I will talk about derive from observing the effect of the internet on the areas we understand – broadly how to protect viewers and listeners from harm – and intervening in various way to ensure they get better quality than they would otherwise get.

Enough pre-amble. What are our predilections?

Basically that the traditional approach doesn’t wash any more. The internet is beyond any individual government’s or regulator’s control and consequently what we need to do is to stimulate the already evident disposition of internet players to take self-regulatory initiatives. And we need to bolster this with a much more ambitious view of developing media literacy than has been evident until now.

Internet service regulation as an end to end process

Let me go at this a bit more slowly.

The internet content market is a global network, with no central control of the services offered and therefore no single point for consumer protection enforcement. It is possible to illustrate this if I run through the architecture of the internet content market: the producers, content aggregators, web hosts, and search and navigation engines all act in a global market, while local ISPs are pure carriers with no prior responsibility for the content carried. They – the ISPs – can block illegal content, but only after the fact (when content is identified to them as illegal). No single player or no collection of players in a single layer of the value chain can ensure a safe internet environment.

From a brief survey we published in the summer describing different approaches to consumer protection issues on the internet– such as privacy and security, and protection from illegal or inappropriate content, or from malicious software – I have four main, almost self-evident, observations:

The traditional role of the content regulator will not translate across to the global reach and open nature of the internet.
The broad range of internet services – from e-commerce to VoD to email – will require a broad and flexible set of industry led protection initiatives; no regulator or collection of regulators can keep up in a coherent way.
Successful consumer protection on the internet has generally involved a much higher degree of co- and self-regulation than has been the case for other media.
The internet inevitably places a much greater responsibility on consumers to take action to protect themselves.

If you agree these observations to be more or less self-evident truths, it has implications for regulators and government, for the industry and for consumers. This is what I’ll now talk about.

Role of Regulators and Government

First, regulators and government.

The internet gives rise to some well-known problems, which cannot be addressed by a translation of existing powers and structures and the distributed and open nature of the internet means that no single regulatory initiative can deliver the security that we see in today’s ex-ante broadcast regulation. Let me illustrate this by talking about filtering. Although filters will remain a useful element of the consumers’ toolkit in managing their exposure to internet content, I don’t consider that they are an appropriate tool for statutory purposes. Despite improved technology and effectiveness in blocking some undesirable content, filters are still seriously flawed and unsuitable as a sole tool to solve a complex problem. They may deprive their users of many thousands of valuable Web pages, on subjects ranging from war and genocide to safer sex and public health while providing a false sense of security. More generally, internet filtering solutions still require active involvement from consumers – for example to set appropriate levels of filtering for internet use by themselves, by young children, by teenagers etc. In addition, the general fallibility of filters, and the particular difficulty presented by P2P content sharing will continue to require parental involvement with or monitoring of children’s web use.

Assume, in the interests of getting to your glass of wine, this example has general significance with respect to regulatory tools for the internet. Where does this leave Government, its agencies, and the judicial system? At the most basic level, we should seek to apply general law to rogue operators in the online world as we do offline – although this necessarily involves much greater international collaboration. There are good examples of such cooperation already under way – such as the International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network (ICPEN), which is formalising international cooperation in trading standards enforcement. Initiatives like this help extend the reach of national judicial authorities beyond national borders (though there is much further to go).

However, we believe the content regulator’s role in relation to the internet is a distinct one. A national regulator cannot exercise control over the full range of content services offered online, in contrast to the way it does with today’s broadcast media. To assume statutory control would be to make consumers a promise on which the regulator cannot deliver. Instead, the regulator must focus its attention on enabling consumers to take responsibility for their engagement with media, and on supporting the development of industry bodies which can help consumers to do so.

Role of industry players and self regulatory approaches

Let me now talk about the industry and self-regulation.

There is a broad range of exciting individual or collective industry initiatives which can work together to support consumer protection all along the distribution line.

Producers can label their content through ICRA and in the UK self and co-regulatory bodies such as the Advertising Standards Association and the Press Complaints Commission monitor standards. At the content aggregation level, companies such as AOL offer a filtered proposition and also label content. Self regulatory organisations such as ATVOD which regulates the video on demand industry protect consumers of on-demand audiovisual services. Web hosts and ISPs work with the IWF to take down illegal content, block illegal URLs and filter content. Search engines and navigation tools can not link to illegal content and also have measures to enable surfers to protect themselves - like Google safe search.

Specifically looking at content – contributions to safety can and are being made by operators in every part of the value chain. Producers can label, aggregators can categorise or tier, hosts can take down, ISP’s can block, search engines can tier or filter, consumers can filter and parents can monitor their children’s access. We welcome moves by ISPs such as AOL to promote integrated mechanisms for consumer protection on the internet including their security centre and parental controls as self-regulation may be the most effective way to protect consumers.

Role of consumer

Turning to the consumer, the internet inevitably places a much greater responsibility on consumers to take action to protect themselves. We believe that this is best achieved through a combination of media literacy and consumer devices such as firewalls and filtering software (which as I have already discussed are not foolproof).

Media literacy is about empowerment. Just as the growth of traditional literacy empowered previous generations, media literacy skills are now essential to be an active and empowered citizen in a society in which we are inundated by media messages. Media literacy allows people to exercise their rights: the right to informed choice over the media content we access; the right to make critical response to media communications; and the right to use new media technologies to create and distribute our own communications and creative achievements.

It is not just individuals who benefit from media literacy. Improving media literacy in the population will strengthen participation in democratic government. For Europe to progress as a competitive knowledge economy, we need a workforce with world class media literacy skills.

Media literacy is important for users of the internet in general and especially for those who view, interact or communicate through the internet. The way people ‘consume’ content today is changing and the way we now view, interact and communicate in the world around them is different from previous generations. Some of the moving images consumers have access to will have been made for a different audience, perhaps in a different country. Some may have been produced with no regard to regulation (or the law), let alone with regard to ‘acceptable community standards’. This is where the real challenge in media literacy lies. In addition, as has been widely reported in the UK press recently, some of the content that young people produce for their own pages on social networking sites and the personal details that they reveal may leave them open to cyberbullying and approaches from sexual predators. They need to be given the tools to take the right precautions and protect themselves.

Media literacy also plays an important role in addressing some of the other challenges presented by the internet – most notably, in relation to piracy. We know that there will continue to be a battle between hackers and DRM developers – one which the DRM users cannot be confident of winning, as illustrated by the recent cracking of Microsoft’s latest DRM solution. Alongside efforts at technical prevention, and appropriate use of criminal sanctions, we need to ensure the audience are aware of their rights and their responsibilities in relation to intellectual property – and that wholesale filesharing can have a real negative impact on creative industries.

Conclusion

I have sketched a broad philosophy for regulation of the internet – self regulation, media literacy, consumer empowerment. I would repeat my caveat that I mentioned earlier – this view comes from the partial perspective of a content regulator. Let me finish by asking what this philosophy might mean and I’ll pick out two things. First, Ofcom needs to redefine its thinking on media literacy. We have a £500,000 grant from DCMS to promote media literacy. Right now, we need to stop that constraining our thinking and realise media literacy is at the core of what we do; and change accordingly. Second, and this is more a job for legislators than regulators, we need to think how the law should most usefully underpin self-regulation. This is a big topic at the European level as well as here in the UK. But it will repay some thought from the people in the room here today.

Thank you.