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Australia To Consider Licensing Streamed Content
TheSync writes: "The Australian Broadcasting Company is report ing that the Australian government is considering whether Internet streaming video and audio should come under the definition of broadcasting, and thus be liable to licensing requirements by the Australian Broadcasting Authority. Other articles on this issue can be found at TheAge.Com.au and Austra lia IT. This could lead to streaming
licensing fees and possibly more censorship." Seems like the legislature believes that Australia should be an island unto itself, instead a well-connected island.
This appears to be related to proposed legislation that would ban the use of data channels (datacasting) in digital television broadcast transmissions for streaming audio/video. The goal of the legislation is to prevent people from competing with the Australian television networks by stuffing video programming in a datacasting stream. See this article for a fuller description of the controversy.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The principle behind FCC regulation of broadcasting in the USA was that the radio spectrum needed to be managed because it was not practical to just allow anyone who wanted to use it however they wanted to use it to go ahead and use it. Today, technology allows much great use of the radio spectrum in the air than they could have imagined then. Still, there are only 67 TV channels in the USA, and that number is declining (most cities cannot use 14-20).
FCC regulation has extended to Cable TV which doesn't have the problems of over the air broadcasting. Anyone with the money to hang their own wires could do so and it won't interfere (for the most part). Still, it is regulated. And there are some causes for it, or at least there used to be. One reason was that the resources required were so immense, but once paid out and deployed, so much was possible on a shared basis, that governments thought this should be done. That and the fact that public resources were being used to lay the wires (varies by jurisdiction).
The FCC could very well try to apply regulations of Cable TV to internet broadcasting. Obviously the internet model already permits massive sharing, and the technology has made so much possible. But government bureaucrats may still not see it this way. They may still want to control things such as content. Can we legally advertise cigarettes on the internet, even if it is a broadcasting format? What about pornographic images of children which there are clearly broad laws against? How do you define what laws apply and what laws do not (especially laws made before the internet existed)?
There is an opposing danger, too. What if monopoly control of the internet facilities ends up giving too few too much control over it all, and they end up doing things that stop the little guy, or the controversial (especially anti-big-corporation) speech, from happening or getting out very far? Would we want government to step in and prevent the monopoly control?
How to balance this is the big issue I see.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
does not make it a duck. It's just a "review" at this point, and hopefully someone will explain to this board the difference between analog broadcasting over public frequencies and packet-based unicast on private leased lines. Regulating one is management of a finite shared resource; regulating the other doesn't serve the public interest and is mostly unenforceable.
The only analogous situation I can imagine would be if the Australian government subsidized a national IP network which supported multicast, and people were transmitting ("broadcasting") things on that. This study sounds like a case of either the government seeking a new source of revenue, or traditional media lobbying for a "level playing field" to help them compete.
Even if they do come to some ridiculous conclusions and make them law, that shouldn't have any effect on streams coming from outside Australia, any more than they could make someone in Malaysia get an Australian license for their late-night shortwave broadcasts.
Eventually I expect IP-over-radio services for portable computers (or other network-aware devices) will be available in many areas, and it will be interesting to see how that pans out in terms of regulation, especially if any bandwidth currently used for analog transmissions is reclaimed for packet radio.
Java: the COBOL of the new millenium.
"Democratic elections" does not mean we should ignore what they do when they aren't campaigning. And constitutional governments exist because some ideas about public policy should not have legal or military force behind them, no matter how many idiot citizens think they are a good idea when you poll them!
Actually, I would want to "let my kids seen pornographic filth on TV". Some state and local governments in the US have passed weird restrictions on when adult programming can be aired ("cabled" actually) or how it has to be scrambled to "protect children", and a lot of them have been struck down by the Supreme Court(s), because they were found to infringe on the rights of adults to view such material.
So what if the ACLU stands up for my right to filth just because a lot of their money comes from adult video stores... they stand up for my Constitutional rights in general, and I thank them for it. Anyway, there are a lot worse things that happen to children than seeing some bad acting by naked people... and if the government wants to "help the children" (I'm thinking particularly of state and local governments in the US), perhaps they should devote their energies to at least refocusing the public schools from babysitting to learning.
I'm really tired of fundamentalist zealots telling me what it's OK for me to do based on their ideas about raising their children. I don't care for the implied comparison, and I don't need the government to play father for me.
The Internet should at least be "free" to the extent that speech between people in public and in private is, and communities that can't handle that should feel "free" to collapse into black holes of superdense self-righteousness from which no rational thought escapes--and sever your phone lines while you're at it!
BTW, while we are on the subject of "fuzzy-headed thinking", try to understand the distinction between "free speech" and "free beer". Taxing certain kinds of speech impinges on both forms of "freedom".
And if I am just responding to a troll responding to a troll... well, sometimes the tripe people post is so ridiculous and narrow-minded I cannot bear to leave it unanswered.
Java: the COBOL of the new millenium.
How about if a bunch of citizens set up a private network apart from the Internet? It'd be fairly easy to do -- DSL is relatively cheap and point to point, so you could establish a private network with just a few lines.
How about establishing a private VPN on top of the Internet? Would that be prone to the same government regulation?
How big would any of these have to get to become a blip on the governmental radar? It's the same thing with setting up an alternative DNS. If only a few dozen people use it, no one notices. No trademark suits will likely arise from its use. If a million or so people start using it, that would likely change, despite the fact that the service would be essentially a private creation with no affiliation to any of the traditional internet governing bodies. At what point does it become regulatable property?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Like it or not (and I guess most don't), there really are good reasons for government intervention sometimes.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Now the problem for me is that we sell video streaming stuff, but low end (AXIS 2400's etc) streaming JPEG stuff , for small end corporate use (IP security cams etc).
Now my first thought would be to licence it as say free for under 10,000 viewers and at a rate above that, but on further thought, the bastards would just take it offshore, leaving the little guy paying the bill.
Radio frequencies are indeed getting crowded, but don't kill video conferencing IP style just yet. That'd just be dumb.
Stupid govt. I'm voting Labor next time.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I don't agree with what they're doing at all, but I think one of the main reasons behind this would be so the Australian government can help "encourage" local content.
The media in Australia has some very strict local content quotas and although I don't live there at the moment (I'm from New Zealand), it's been very successful in making sure that Australians get some decent good quality local productions. It's also been great for the local music industry because, for example, the radio stations have to play a certain amount of "new" local content meaning they have to keep scouting for it.
What they're probably doing for better or worse, is trying to grasp control of internet streaming before it gets away from them so they can control it in the same way. It's no secret that sooner or later, internet types of media will eventually replace analogue transmissions. If the Australian government is not in control of it by that time, it would be much harder to transfer the quotas.
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We've already seen this happen with cryptography, betting and porn. The standard for the net as a whole is set by the least restrictive country that is connected.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck load of tapes
Licensing broadcast media makes sense because, and was originally done because, there's a limited amount of broadcast frequency available and because broadcasting effectively travels across everyone else's property.
Not so of web broadcasts--there's an effectively unlimited number of frequencies (URLs) and bandwidth is plentiful. The two rationales for licensing streaming content are therefore censorship and taxation.
As for taxation, I don't know how it is in Australia (can someone from Down Under inform us?), but here in the U.S. we don't even tax traditional broadcasters much for the frequencies they use--it's always annoyed me that the airwaves in the U.S. are practically given away to large corporations, when they should be rented by the government at a fair market value instead. But instead of taxing the corporations in this country, we tax the people... blech...
Censorship is of course the biggest issue here, and probably the one which most excites the Australian government. It amazes me that the same country which used to fairly often publish pictures of naked 16 year olds in the Australian version of Playboy, now restricts tightly even mildly sexual content on web sites, not to mention mere stories and text. Western cultures and societies have to start moving towards less censorship and more understanding of different viewpoints and their value, or endure a tyranny of the majority which will stamp out all individuality and turn us into something from an Orwell novel. Regulating Net video streams may not seem a step in this direction, but it is. Restricting violent video games, as a story from earlier today says Canada is doing, doesn't seem a step in this direction, but it is. Things which are personally offensive must be tolerated, if for no other reason than that each of us likes something or another that someone else will find offensive, and if we each got the government to censor what we don't like, nothing unique would be left uncensored.
That's why it bothers me so much when Australians censor sex, violence, and drugs on the Net, when Americans censor sex on TV and everywhere else, and when Europeans censor even unrealistic violence, when France censors opinions about WWII and even WWII relics, and when Canadians censor books and magazines about homosexuality. What kind of a Western Civilization does that leave us with? What kind of a future can we look forward to, when "global culture" emerges full of the censorships and biases of each country melded into one seamless McDonaldsization of mediocre sameness? We have to start working extra hard to make sure we emphasize our rights and freedoms, not our selfish desire to censor, because we're living in times when those very rights are in flux thanks to new media.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
In the United States, the theory on why the government should regulate broadcasting is:
- There are only a limited number of frequency bands out there to use.
- The electro-magnetic spectrum is public property.
(Or it used to be something like this).However, the Internet isn't limited to a certain number of bands, and the Internet isn't considered public property, so the FCC hasn't applied broadcasting regulations to the Internet (thank God!).
But in Australia, what is the theory behind regulating broadcast mediums? Would this theory hold that the Internet should be regulated as well?
--Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Will they be setting up a block on any streaming media arriving in Austrailia? Maybe they will require ISPs to block every unlicensed stream? What about buddyphone?
Anyone want a free trip or Australia? Just send some streaming media there, and they'll haul you off to Australia for a trial.
Fight Spammers!
As most Australians know, the media moguls (in particular Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch, and to a lesser extent, Kerry Stokes) wield considerable power and few politicians dare to defy them. Possibly this "suggestion" has something to do with them trying to retain their power base. I agree that it's not a very sensible idea.
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net