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A report of the Lords European Union Committee offered new reasons to oppose the Commission's draft Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMS), successor of the Television Without Frontiers Directive, that will extend television regulation to some Internet video services.
The Directive was approved in its first reading by the Parliament in December 2006 and should be backed now by the Council of Ministers.
The Directive, as it is now drafted, applies only to commercial TV-like services, but concerns still exist on the vagueness of what this would cover and the fear that the regulation might be wrongly applied to other content such as that of blogs.
Lord Freeman, chairman of the Lords European Union Committee stated: "Such an attempt risks damaging the new media industry, which is a vibrant and important sector of the UK's economy."
The report warned that the Directive might cause production companies outside of the EU to try and escape the regulation, considering UK would be one of the main victims of this action.
The Lords committee considers that EU as regulator should not help to preserve the dominance of the players already established on the market and does not see the necessity to introduce "quantitative restrictions on advertising in a market which is now clearly open to competition".
"We are concerned that the identification of some of media services as 'television-like', may lead some to conclude that eventually 'like services' should be regulated in a 'like-manner', i.e. a perfectly 'level playing field'," said the report. "If these services are to be included at all we agree that they must be regulated differently, but the wording and definitions in the latest versions of the text may encourage the idea that they can and should be regulated in the same way as television. We would consider such a move now or in the future to be a grave error."
The EU presidency, presently hold by Germany, expressed its wish to finalise the Directive by June 2007. The new act should be implemented within 2 years into the national legislations of the member countries.
Television Without Frontiers - Report with Evidence - House of Lords -
European Union Committee, 3rd Report of Session 2006-07 (23.01.2007)
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200607/ldselect/ldeucom/27/...
Lords oppose new media Directive (8.02.2007)
http://www.out-law.com/page-7742
EDRI-gram: New Audiovisual Directive: First Reading in EU Parliament
completed (20.12.2006)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number4.24/avms
EP Legislative Observatory AVMS Directive file
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/file.jsp?id=5301252