SEVENTH ANNUAL INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUMBAKU, AZERBAIJAN

SUSTAINABLE HUMAN, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT8 NOVEMBER 2012

14:30 CETWORKSHOP NO. 115

MEDIA PLURALISM AND FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION IN THE INTERNET AGE

********This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.

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>> Hello, everybody. I'll test the mic, see if it works? I think it's, uh, it's about time to start the workshop. Exactly, so....

>> Why don't you sit here? I'll just move this? There's another one there.

>> I test the mic again. Does it work for you? Channel 2. Channel 3, there's jazz music. Channel 5 is Latin classical. What happens the panelists should have headphones too, right?

>> Yes.>> Andrea Renda: So, if someone can bring headphones for the

panelists? Okay, fantastic, I'll go with Pilar. All right...all right...I'll ask everybody to take a seat because we need to get started with the workshop. I see people still, um, standing in line a bit to get the ear phone.

All right, good afternoon. My name is Andrea and I'll be moderating this workshop. Can everybody hear me? I've did not told channel 2. If you find better music on channel 3, then pick channel 3. If you want to listen to the workshop on media pluralism and freedom of expression in the internet age, you have to pick channel 2.

We have a good line-up of speakers. I'll give a quick introduction to the workshop and I'll start with the panelists, uh, so I'll give the floor to the first panelist.

Why have we decided to propose the organization of this workshop? Well, I, uh, in the talk on behalf of the Organizational Workforce a think tank in Brussels called the Center for European Policy Studies. A couple years ago, thanks to my initiative, in that occasion, decided to launch a digital forum and I, myself, being specialized in information society

related issues from a law and economics perspective have been guiding that forum since then. I've been involved in a number of research projects and initiatives that the EU institutions have been launching over time, with respect to the evolution of the internet, future of internet governance, the policy approaches and layers of the internet and finally issues related to pluralism and freedom of expression.

So, when we had the first talks with the Europe commission, European Parliament about which workshops to propose a few months back, I had the idea to organize this workshop with the European Commission. It's not only on behalf of CEPS, but this is a timely and important one. Reflection of those issues should be represented. In the past weeks and months, uh, the European institutions have been launching a number of research projects in the field of, uh, media pluralism, the Council of Europe has a long standing reflection on the notion of media and mediation of media policy.

All of this leads to a very fertile ground to contribute new ideas and experience as to, uh, what impact the internet, the advent of the internet can have on already-established notions such as the pluralism of the media and freedom of expression and the policies that are reflected, that are dedicated to those issues. This is why this workshop came into being. We have a very good line-up of speakers today. We don't only want to represent the EU focus, of course, despite the fact that the co-organizers of the workshop are all from the EU. We want to show partly what the EU is thinking about doing, but at the same time, we want to compare this with the experience on the field, but also in policy terms in other parts of the world. That's, uh, basically the main purpose of the workshop.

The other thing, the final thing I want to add before I give the floor to the first panelist, we had the idea of doing a bit more than we usually do after this workshop has been organized. Normally what is done is a sort of brief document that summarizes, uh, what the workshop, what the main contents of the workshops have been.

In this case, um, we have reflected a little bit with the European Commission. We have decided to transform this workshop into a more concrete document with policy recommendations.

So, um, those of you in the audience, those that want to participate remotely, this is even more important for you, because if you participate and contribute your ideas, these will be reflected in a document of policy recommendations, at the time where not only at the EU level, but at the global level, there's a need for fresh ideas on these topics. I hope that the debate that we're about to have here today, in the coming hour will demonstrate there's a need for ideas and fresh contributions.

Now the first panelist we have today is Eli Noam, a top expert in the field of Telecoms and media. A good friend and really visionary expert to the evolution of Information Society. So Eli has accepted our invitation to come here. We've allocated to every panelist for the first round of speeches, five minutes. I know it's not a lot, but this leaves you time when I will call for contribution from the audience to, to ask questions and get some more from the experts than what they will be able to deliver in their five-minute speech. Eli, please take the floor. Thank you for being here with us.

>> Eli Noam: Can you hear me? Can you hear me now? All right. Great. Thank you very much, Andrea, thank you very much IGF and CEPS. It's a busy panel, so let me get started. We all here are enthusiasts and different tribes that agree on many things, but we don't agree on one thing. That internet is a force for pluralism. Wrong. While people, what they believe is that if there are problems with the diversity on the internet and with pluralism on the internet, it is usually because of restrictive and backwards government or restrictive and back words phone companies, restrictive and backwards media barracks.

So if you do something about those bad actors, everything will be fine. 100 flowers will flourish. This view is comforting. It shifts the responsibility for problems of pluralism onto others. It's their fault. It's comforting and it is also convenient, but what I will argue here is that the internet is actually not the solution to pluralism, sadly as it is. No, the internet is actually part of the problem. It's not a problem because of bad people acting badly. It's not the problem because of a lack of good intention or lack of idealism. It's a problem because of fundamental economic characteristics of the internet medium working themselves out into new equilibrium.

The implication is that just going after the legacy phone companies, or going after the legacy government bureaucrats will not solve the problem. We need to think of additional and positive steps to assure pluralism and those steps will have to deal with the internet players themselves. Not with people outside.

Now, media pluralism versus media concentration is not a new story, it's an old story. Each generation had to deal with problems of control or recontent in pipes. In America, short names are Western Union, William Randalhurst, Edison Trust, IBM, each generation had to deal with media ownership issues. Each generation looked for technology as the solution. Radio was going to overcome the dominance of the newspaper barrens. Broadcast TV was going to become a locally-run medium. Cable television was going to open TV. Small computers were going to overcome IBM's domination. Excuse me for just a minute. Turns

out, actually that this hadn't been opened. So...I'll just open this here.

Each case, the new technology, once it was successful in overcoming the old technology, then created its own new set of dominance, which in turn required a new set of struggle to overcome. In each case, the new technology heads its own set of enthusiasts who believe whole-heartedly that the technology they were part of was going to solve many of the world's problems. Ignorance, public health, democracy, poverty, just read what people wrote when radio came about, when television came about, when cable television came about. Idealistic rhetoric at the time and that we still hear about the internet.

It's a tribute to human optimism, but also to the ability to forget or ignore the past or believe that this time things will be different. And it is therefore an unpopular task to tell this internet audience here that when it comes to media pluralism, the internet is not the solution, but it is actually becoming the problem. I have only a few minutes to do so, I can give you only a few numbers. I'm reporting findings from a study on media ownership around the world. Peggy, here is one of the participants. We managed it at Columbia University. Supported by the Open Society Institute, we cover 80% of the world's population, 80% of the world GDP and we cover some of those media industries, about 13 media industries. We have data to analyze a thousand issues.

So right now, we'll look at one story. The concentration comparison of old media, print, basically. 20th century media, which is film and radio and broadcast television and so on, and new media, uh, that is internet-type media. When you compare this, what the data shows are several things.

You have three bars here. The green bar, a traditional media, the red bar are 20th century media, and the blue bar are internet media. You see several things, first, you see that pretty much everywhere there are rising, each generation of media is more concentrated than the one before, not less so, but more so. Okay...you also see, as a subsidiary observation, since this is a European-organized event, that European media pluralism or concentration is actually higher, despite the sometimes smug self-image, is actually higher than that of North America. And in some industries, particularly 20th century industries, it is actually higher than it is in Asia-Pacific.

Now, but in particular you see, that kind of rise over time in the new media. And, in fact, it is for these internet media, it tends to be above 3,000, an index of 3,000, which is, um, concentration index of industrial organization, which 3,000 is very high, okay?

Now...I have to deal with two computers at the same time. And that reflects itself in things like what is the most powerful media company? Media, broadly defined in the world in terms of concentration, multiplied by market shares, weighted by the size of the industry, weighted by the number of countries where it is, it is by a very far margin, very high margin, it is Google, okay? Google is off the charts in terms of its power index, relative to small companies such as Rupert Murdoch's News Corp or Time Warner or Telefonica.

The internet, everybody can enter, easy, right? This is a concentration only on the entry barriers. The entry barriers have indeed declined, good. But there's another factor, which are economies of scale. That is usually kind of disregarded. If you put those two things together, as I have done, in a model that I can just kind of summarize here, you basically, you have entry barriers, you have scale economies and if kind of, they can go into different directions and depending on the directions they're going, you have certain outcomes. What you have here is declining entry barriers, but rising scale economies. Those two together lead to a U-shaped concentration. A U-shaped concentration -- sorry, I don't have that -- that basically goes up and down. First, down. That's what people focus on. Then they forget and stop observing that things are going up again.

Okay, and in fact, they go up and down, and there's a certain cyclicality here. The cyclicality is for reason of another factor, capital intensity that is rising. The cyclicality is on the whole, on an access that is upwardly sloping. Furthermore, what we observe from our data is that the -- whoops. Is that, um...that the concentration trends of content media, which are lower than platform media, which are higher are converging. And the intuition behind it is that media are becoming more capital intensive. That it was easier to be a book publisher, there wasn't much in capital investment necessary. If you're going to become an internet publisher, the capital intensity, relative to your entire costs are increasing considerably. And that leads, economically speaking, to higher scale, higher fixed costs, lower marginal costs, higher scale. More concentrated market. We observe this pretty much around the world. So it is not something that there's this media barren and that regulatory agency and politics here. There are fundamental forces at work. Because they're fundamental, it's difficult to deal with them. It's not so easy to pass another regulation.

This is kind of an observation about today. If we look into the future, what we can predict is that actually this will continue. It will continue because the next generation, the emerging generation of television media, over the internet is actually going to be more complex, more capital intensive, will

have a higher scale, will have a greater globalization internationally. That internet-type media will have, um, will have dimensions of, um, let's see, higher resolution, 4K and 8K. It'll have three-dimensionality, it'll have interactivity, such as games, it'll have virtual reality, maybe not this one. This isn't exactly consumer-friendly, but this one already is and that is being, being unveiled, uh, was already unveiled and becoming a consumer product, probably within a few weeks or months. And then there's the personalization, where you can actually, kind of target different content to different people. This audience here, since everybody, nobody's listening to me, actually, except electronically, there could be two sound tracks. One, you agree with, and another one you disagree with, kind of, could be like a politician, right? I could have several messages simultaneously, sorry Pilar, so, so, uh, so, plus, um, other things such as multiplatform. We could go to TV as sets in automobiles and in the pocket and so on.

We have user-generated content, Avatars and virtual worlds, globalized television and on and on. The point is, this kind of television will be really expensive to produce. This is not a kind of like, um, YouTube-type television. Of course, the long tail is going to be there, it's going to be active, it's going to be innovative, it's going to be creative, it's going to be wonderful, but the main audience isn't going to be there. The main audience is going to be the premium products, because the time is valued and they want to have a premium experience, that's the experience that we've had in the past. That kind of television is really expensive to produce.

Take a look, Avatar had over 800 computer graphic artists and spent $50 million on special effects for a two-hour movie. So this kind of, sorry, this kind of television is likely to be extremely diverse, will have multiple players and technologies and software that have to be integrated and there are different ways to integrate it. The basic way that I say this to be integrated would be through kind of cloud mechanisms. The Google cloud, the Netflix cloud and Hulu cloud, NBC, FOX and others or the BBC cloud or others. These will be the integrators. There'll be large and there'll be global. They have to be highly capitalized with lots of skills and experiences.

Now, I'm getting to the end here, don't worry. So, um...so this television of the future, in my mind is going to be, perhaps can be called, it's going to be not just the TV of clouds, but the cloud of clouds. The environment will be one of multiple clouds and the trick is, okay, the trick is to kind of integrate those various clouds and to avoid dominance by any particular cloud in the way that we have today, a dominance in certain sectors of Apple with its vertically-integrated type cloud

mechanism. Google with its emerging power into equipment and all kinds of other stuff.

So the question is how to go about that? How to go about preventing media power in this environment? And there are various approaches. The first approach is to do absolutely nothing and to let market forces and technologists and creative entries kind of rule. But that has problems and I don't have time to develop that.

The second approach is to intervene. Those are kind of the knee-jerk traditional responses. Regulate the market structure and regulate behavior. And there is some room for these, of course, there kind of, they're basically not the main solutions. Then there is kind of a more positive solution, which is the funding of new platforms and voices, such as content creators and new organizations, traditional organizations, and then, but in particular, I believe, it has to be a role of public institutions in governments in providing interoperability tools to make it possible for smaller entities, whether they're private or public or individual to link up together, kind of conveniently and effectively and that means some funding for research and development for middleware, some loosening of copyright provisions for fair use and compulsory licensing. The creation or support of a cloud of clouds to interconnect and the creation, I believe, of principles, of principles of interoperability for the next generation of media clouds.

Unfortunately, I don't have time to kind of go into some of those principles that I believe should be established, um, and, such as national sovereignty issues and reciprocity issues. So I have to come to the end here and kind of conclude in the following way. To say...the next generation of media, in my view, is going to be potentially, actually anti-pluralist. And that is, again, to repeat, not because of bad intentions, bad designs, but because of the fundamental economic structure. There's a need to protect pluralism through public support of voices and through the protection of interoperability. It may be early now, but it is only a short time before the TV, such TV, the TV of the cloud of clouds is going to be with us. And when it is with us, companies will already have forged ahead in such a way that it'll be too late to do anything about it. So therefore, let's think together, to have some media-friendly, user-friendly, global-friendly principles that people can work within. And we, at Columbia are designing, trying to draft such principles. We invite you to participate with us. And I thank you very much for your attention.

[applause]>> Andrea Renda: Thank you very much, Eli for an interesting

presentation that has set the stage for a very thought-provoking

workshop. While I invite, uh, Peggy to start, uh, you're not going to the podium, up to you. Just a quick comment, uh, um, on Eli's, I think, already, um, Pilar del Castillo has follow-up to what Eli said. We're shaping up nicely for dialogue with the industry. What Eli said reminded me of a famous quote by Herbert Simon that used to say a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

And sometimes the internet can be referred to as anti-pluralist, also for these reasons, but mostly the message is related to a different thing. The fact that many people might want to see the internet as something that comes and saves us and creates no additional need for a public policy in support of pluralism, but indeed, what Eli's strongest message is, there is something we need to do now in order to protect pluralism, not just take the internet as something that comes and saves us without no need for public policy. Good for policymakers, you have something to do.

Peggy Valcke has done work in this field. I think she can go, of course, freedom of expression, she is free to structure, uh, contribution as she wants. Uh, but I'm, I would be happy if Peggy told us something also about her studies about, uh, how to, um, affect the conduct of choice intermediaries on the internet and organize pluralism by design or adopt rules that ensure pluralism in cyberspace. Thanks, Peggy, for being with us today.

>> Peggy Valcke: Thank you very much for the invitation, Andrea. I believe, in the five minutes that's being allocated to me, I, um, I will try to build on what has been said so far and I will also rely on work of colleagues, academic colleagues like, uh, at the university of Amsterdam. Like Eli, I have tried to start with something that I thought there would be consensus about, but in order to nuance that a bit. So my starting point would be that, I believe there is consensus about the fact that we are currently living in an information paradise and the internet has played a crucial role in this. The internet has lowered the threshold for people to share information and opinions with the wide public. There's an explosion of content producers on the internet which offers opportunities both in terms of political, cultural, geographical diversity.

I use the words of Dr. Helberg of the University of Amsterdam. The snake cannot be far away. There are several snakes. I'd like to focus on a particular snake. Adam and Eve or the common user. You said it, Andrea, with today's digital abundance, it's becoming increasingly obvious that consumers are no longer able to wait for all the content thrown at them. The question arises, how can we make sure that the user still chooses from a healthy, uh, and diverse media diet, in this context that economists call a demand-driven environment, instead of a demand-driven

environment and what psychologists call an area of mass communication.

There are a number of strategies that could be followed. First strategy which is already being explored to large extent under the form of media literacy policies is to try to empower users to cope with information abundance. Another strategy could be to develop better tools to measure online diversity. At the level of supply, but also at the level of exposure.

How diverse is the content, actually, that we, the user citizens consume through online use, websites, through blogs, for instance. Is it really so diverse as we believe it is? Or are these online news sites just copying from one another? What is the impact of multisourcing? Um, the fact that people no longer rely on one newspaper, but pick their information from different sources, what impact should that have on existing policies in the area of media ownership, media concentration.

For the time being, um, I believe that there is still quite some scope for research on appropriate methods to measures such exposure diversity. When I was involved in the study for European Commission, uh, on the indicators for media pluralism, in 2008, 2009, we tried to include, uh, user, um, diversity, exposure diversity elements in the measurement tool and we had to, uh, or, the conclusion or the constraints, the limits we were faced with was that there are currently, um, no well-developed methods to actually measure online diversity.

Another strategy could be to stimulate both new and traditional media to approve user-generated content to make a meaningful contribution to media pluralism. This could be under the form of integrating user-generated content in their services or by stimulating platforms for user-generated content to be very transparent and open about their editorial goals or guidelines that they set for themselves.

And finally I'd like to say something about potential strategies to enable and assist users to find and recognize quality content online. This is where the idea of diversity by design comes in. An idea that the power of media consumption today, lies as much with those who guide individuals to content, through tools such as search engines, electronic program guides, social media platforms. These choice intermediaries play a role in informing their choices. How could they contribute in not only helping users to find media content, but to make them consume more diverse content and be confronted with different opinions. Is there a role for what we call diversity by design? A concept also being researched in the area of privacy, how can we implement privacy principles into technology? Perhaps at first sight, I'd like to stress this isn't about direct government in the form of dictating the search results. This

idea is about inviting choice intermediaries to protect about alternative means to present search results to users. Not only based on previous search queries of the user, but also on the basis of for instance, serendipity. Radio and TV broadcasters to offer diverse information. Programs and minority languages or reflecting minority cultures. With obligations for search intermediaries to make certain content more prominent in order to nudge users towards consuming more diverse content.

Already today, electronic program guides, TV guides are in a number of European member states, suggest to obligations to list specific channels like public service channels on a, to give them a more prominent place, um, than others. And the question I'd like to put forward today is whether we could expect something similar from online choice intermediaries. Given that the open internet and traditional TV services as Eli just explained are more and more converging. And secondly, can we expect such thing as, take into account diversity principles in the technology, can we expect that from all online search or choice intermediaries, or should it be a specific task allocated to for instance, a public service navigator. I will stop here, I think this is already food for thought.

>> Andrea Renda: A lot of food for thought. Thank you very much, Peggy. I think it's very interesting, the fact that you speak about nudging techniques towards diversity. I was thinking that the same scholar that has put forward the idea of nudging and public policy, Cass Sunstein, is the same guy that wrote, perhaps Eli remembers it better than anybody else. Wrote a book called Republic.com. He went back to the idea of the daily me, by understating the dangers of end users being able to preselect the sources of information that will compose their favorite, uh, package of information on a daily basis. And then receiving on a daily basis, basically, the mirror image of themselves and their preferences, rather than receiving anything else. So the idea of serendipity, it's difficult to enforce in practice, which is why we have Peggy, and my curiosity, to what extent the principles that Eli and this team are developing at CITI and Columbia and the ideas that Peggy has converge. But I will ask you later.

The third panelist we have today is Anja Kovacs. Anja comes from a different perspective. She'll help us expand the scope of this debate beyond what's been discussed and represented so far. The idea is that these workshops, dedicated to media pluralism and freedom of expression is also to discuss how the advent of the internet has expanded the possibilities for access to content and for the exercise of the rights to be heard and to make one's self heard, not only in developed, but also in developing countries. So that's what thrilled us about Anja and why we decided to invite her to represent the experience of the internet

democracy project in New Delhi. Anja, full freedom of expression for you. Be free to, uh, to say whatever you want, but we are happy in any case to have you here.

>> Anja Kovacs: Thank you, Andrea. I'm not sure though, I'm fully going to do what you just set out. I think the two previous speakers already made a lot of points that I wanted to get to as well, so I'm supposed to be one of those, I guess, internet activists who have the reputation of thinking that the internet is the best thing since hot water and that, uh, this has made a massive difference in terms of, um, helping to strengthen democracy.

If one looks at the Arab revolutions and similar events in other parts of the world, I think that has contributed a lot to the discourse that says the internet is helpful for democracy, but I think we make a mistake if we stop analyze taking there. The big question is not to what extent can the internet help to move into a democratic political system, but what does the internet actually do to democracy as we know it all over the world? And as it evolves? There, I'm not as optimistic at all, this is, out of that, that fear, that tension is that the, the internet democracy project grew, that's is why we have the name we have.

I think some of the points, when it comes to how the concentration of businesses and so the concentration in terms of gate keepers of information, on the internet is becoming bigger and bigger, Eli has already addressed. I'm not going to repeat those. In the morning, I moderated another session in which somebody mentioned a very interesting phrase and said how terms of service are increasingly becoming like accidental constitutions that also shape our behavior in new ways and some of these ways in which our behavior is shaped are actually very, very restrictive.

So in terms of assessing what the internet does for democracy, I think that's a first important point to keep in mind. Secondly, um, at the level of governments, increasingly we see all over the world that governments are, uh, reasserting their sovereign right as they like to remind us, uh, of, um, enforcing policy on the internet as well.

That has had fairly negative consequences for freedom of speech, particularly I would say in democratic countries. I think we've been a little bit naive about the quality of legislation in different places, even if the quality of the legislation is relatively good, I think we underestimate how different the consensus on what is acceptable is in different countries. So within a country, one might feel that restricting particular content is fully appropriate. But in the next country, one doesn't, and nevertheless, both countries say

they're democratic and they respect free speech as it has been guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I think we've underestimated this and increasingly we see a fragmentation there which has to be addressed one way or the other. This is particularly worrying, you see the internet leads to growing levels of surveillance. As far as I'm concerned, it'd be naive of us to think we can go back to levels of surveillance pre-mobile phones and pre-technology. I don't think that will happen. I think it's important that we have more safeguards on surveillance, but I do think in this day and age, we have to accept that higher level of surveillance will be there.

But in terms of democratic theory, traditionally the ideas that the power of the state, which initially was mostly located in military force, having control over violence, is balanced by rights and in those rights, free speech was a crucial tool.

So if we now see that on the one hand, the surveillance power or the power of the state is going up, it becomes actually more and more to strengthen free speech and that's why I think it's really important that we reassess the legal frameworks on the protection of free speech of democracies as well. Rather than simply take it for granted that because it's a democratic state, these legislations actually should be applied on the internet as well and in a problematic way. On the internet, they have consequences beyond that country.

And then finally, the nature of the internet, again, as this has been mentioned, is there too much information? It's interesting you mentioned, too much information might lead to lack of attention. We had a meeting with a grassroots activist in India about the potential of the internet for those activists and there it was quite extensively discussed that possibly too much information also leads to a suppression of descent, simply because the expression was you debate a topic to death. And very interestingly, these were India activists, uh, the reference was very much to a lot of, uh, western TV channels where their discussion was that issues would be discussed so much that in the end, nobody really knew anymore what was true, so no action was taken on big political issues.

I don't want to say whether it's right or wrong, but I thought it was important to bring in that perspective into this conversation.

I also think that that whole question raises a few of the important issues we then have to look at. Again, Peggy already mentioned media education, so I won't go into detail, I do want to emphasize that for developing countries, education relating to media information or the internet is a much bigger challenge than for the developed world. Not in the least because in a country like India, a lot of the next millions of internet users we will

have will also be on people who are the first generation literate people in their family. So issues like parental oversight do not work. Because parents aren't on the internet, in some cases, they can't even read. So there's no way that they will be able to deal with the technology.

So we see that kind of education as the solution, we really have to think much more true how that's going to work in these countries.

A second issue, of course, is the importance of filters. When my colleagues said there's too much information, it suppresses descent, you're not going to hear me say, yes, we should have less information. I think what is points to is there is still a really important role for the mainstream media and for having other people select and, uh, the famous or the popular word on the internet is create information. And people who you trust so you still have certain channels you can go to.

When Newsweek had to close its offline publications, some people were happy about that, but it's not positive at all, we need that plurality to be there. Any media house that has to cut down operations, isn't a good thing.

The final point I wanted to address is that this point about there is too much information, does it help us to get critical? We need to continuously assess how open the internet really is. One of the contradictions is between this assertion of civility, there are increasingly boundaries on areas where there wasn't before. I'm not saying the solution isn't to apply criminal law at all, but these are debates that one needs to get into much more if we want to continue to claim that the internet is open.

And also, again, this interplay between governments and big businesses. Big businesses are actually, the big online intermediaries are responsible for quite a lot of law enforcement issues nowadays and yet, as a citizen, you don't have direct recourse with big business. So again, what does that mean in terms of democracy?

And finally, I think all these various questions about, uh, the internet, the openness, what it does, also points to the fact that it's important to keep all possibilities open. Even many of the strongest, uh, initiatives online that are say, citizen journalism, are very strong about connecting the online and the offline. And so, I support Eli saying we shouldn't see this as the solution to all problems, not just because it cannot reach everywhere, but because it has its own structural problems built in in many ways and we'll never be fully able to resolve those. Seeing internet as the solution to the problem of pluralism in access to information is not the answer. Thank you.

>> Andrea Renda: Thank you very much, Anja. And as I expected, you took a slightly different path, but I think your

contribution fits very nicely with the previous two and gives us an idea of the broader picture we're dealing with, but in a consistent way. So thank you very much for this.

I will have, uh, now give the floor to, uh Giacomo Mazzone. It's a critical and hopefully constructive way of looking at what we need to do now to, uh, to make sure that the internet isn't captured in its architecture and working isn't, uh, really brought to, um, shape, that we wouldn't like from the perspective of media pluralism and freedom of expression.

There's been a lot of talks about media concentration, the new media being even more concentrated. There's a lot, of, of tension being exerted on the traditional media from the new media. I'd expect Giacomo to focus in a speech on this and the floor is your Giacomo and I think listening to the perspective of the broadcasters would be very important in this respect.

>> Giacomo Mazzone: Thank you. Mine will not be a hate speech against the internet, so, cannot be censored because of that. But, will be a warning, a warning about a certain number of issues that haven't been addressed and this is the reason why EBU is participating in the IGF since the beginning, and even since the World Summit of Information Society. We see an enormous perspective, very interesting, but we see also, a lot of, um, non-addressed problems, that if they're not really tackled could hamper the old system and could bring us to believe in a world that not necessarily better than the one before.

Um...I want to point three, let's say four main issues. The first point is cultural diversity. The internet itself doesn't promote cultural diversity. Last year in Nairobi, the panel of IGF, one search engine that I cannot name here that said the best way to ensure circulation of content, national and local content would be to make it in English. I didn't react because I was so surprised in listening to that, for five minutes I wasn't able to react to such a proposal. Because, I totally disagree with that, in the mission of the public service, broadcasting, wherever it is in the world is to maximize the production and circulation of local content and identity content that could create communities and could allow the community to recognize these kind of products.

So the language barrier is a problem and the fact that the language, uh, could become, the language boundaries could become a problem to financing, the resources necessary to produce and to distribute quality content could be a very big problem.

We already know, for instance that very intensive products like movies, for cinema, are produced only in certain number of countries where there is a medium or large market that could allow to finance these kind of projects. Other countries are

already cut out from producing movies, too much expensive for them.

Tomorrow the same thing could happen to broadcasting programs because if, in many countries, we are financing, even for the public service, through advertising revenues, this production and this would mean that the resources are moving from a market to another, notably to the internet market, because this is the kind of erosion we're assisting nowadays. These resources will not be anymore available in the current market and will go elsewhere. In most of the cases will go in other countries, in other regions in the world.

Two years ago in France, the French government at the time had this bizarre idea to say that the, uh, to forbid advertising on the public service would be beneficiary to the quality of the programs because they said this will, um, will prevent the public service to act as a commercial television, looking for better results of audience. So they forbid advertising on PrimeTime and French television.

The secondary scope of this was to help the television and media, to help the same party of the present republic in winning the elections, of course. They were thinking this money coming out from the advertising construct, to the public service will go to them. They discovered that in reality, this money went to another market. It went to direct marketing and to online market. Because, because there is no reason to put more advertising into the same channels to reach the same audience.

So, this showed, in certain market conditions, the flow of the money could go out of the system and then could not participate anymore to the financing, uh, model of the current production and the cultural diversity.

A second problem that worries me more because I have a journalist background, nobody stressed the destruction of hundreds and hundreds of correspondence offices worldwide. In the media, electronic media, I talk from our sector because broadcasters have a problem of financing. The easiest and first solution is to close offices elsewhere and in the press, in the printed media sector, they've closed a lot of offices of correspondence.

So this is replaced how? It is replaced through more use of the agencies, but agencies are shrinking and closing down because the mechanism of financing and press agencies is the same. Corporative market financed by printed media.

So, also the press agencies are closing down. The second level of information is to get information from user-generated content. More and more, we're using, in the traditional media, this kind of content on which we have no guarantee as it was in the past that somebody, that we shared the same, uh, view and the

same, uh, rigor in analyzing the fact and reporting the truth has been applied at the region. So we take this and now at BBC, they have 60 people dealing with only user-generated content. The correspondent office, worldwide, to cover the same contents, an enormous contradiction.

So this worries me because nowadays we have less source of information than before. We have more sources of information if you consider user-generated content, but less reliable sources. For me, reliability in the media is one of the pillars of the relationships we've established during dozens of years between media and the citizens.

The third point that worries me is concentration, again. We, we made, three years ago at the IGF, one panel discussion, because we have a problem in, with the broadcasters moving into the internet. We tried to figure out what is the reach of the programs that we produce, the reach of the news that we deliver in the internet world. A lot of broadcasters now have huge internet activity. So we've tried to sit down with the panel to discuss how we can measure. In the broadcasting world, we have independent sources that are regulated by cooperative of users and advertisers and consumers that measure the audience of single problem. If you want to do the same in internet world, we don't have similar system.

If you want to know how many people have seen the content, you have to go to the source that viewed the content. At the beginning of broadcasting, how much is the audience of this channel? And say, 60% is mine, the other one say 50% is mine and the other one, 30% is yours. Makes 255% of the audience. This is to say we have a problem, we're going into a world where the news doesn't apply in the same way it applies in the past.

Lastly, on this point, all over Europe, we have rules of concentration that they have to intervene beyond certain soil, usually could be 20, 25% of the market, concentration by specific market. This has been agreed also at the European level.

We have one more specific market where the concentration is 80%. There'll one actor that's 80% of the market. And this is the only growing market of the old, um, value chain. Fine. At the very beginning, this could be fine. You have to grow up new markets, but this could be sustainable in the long-term.

Another point concerning concentration, is the kind of rules that applies. Uh, privacy. We have, as European subjects, a certain number of regulations about privacy that doesn't apply to other subjects. If we look at the media market in Europe or the internet market, we, we have two different kinds of regulations that apply. One is the Californian law, most of the subjects are Californian-based and the other is European law. For Europeans to act under the European law is hampering and giving a

competitive advantage to the same companies, the same industries acting under other regulation. Fine. We have to define global market thrills, we have to start to discuss, we are here at the IGF since seven years, trying to see when this discussion was started. This discussion hasn't started yet. We are not even decided from where and which point in which arena this discussion will take place.

This arrived to a point of non-return. With the hybrid or connective television, we have the clashing points in front of us. Because until yesterday, we can say, okay, television is regulated by the, uh TV frontier before and audio vision service-directed. And there's another world that is internet. Today, with Sony and other devices, all the same screens, in the living room, we'll have two different models of regulation applying. One for the TV problem and one for the internet sources material. So simply to make one example, we took those interviewers in Europe to regulate on Formula One. There were clashes of government about this issue that was considered very, very difficult to regulate. Finally we regulated, but now tomorrow, with the hybrid television, you receive the Formula One race on the TV part of the screen and on internet part of the screen, you'll receive the advertising of tobacco coming from another legislation in another country that doesn't apply the same rules that apply as the broadcast. And the same I could say for, uh, election rules. We have election rules, very tight, very strict for each country that applies. The part of the screen that isn't under the media regulation, uh, arrived in the same home on the same screen will follow a different regulation.

I could continue, but is this too long. I want just to end with advertising, because at the end there is always a spot at the end of each program. In this case, the spot is that in my opinion, of course, it's bias because I'm public service, and servant, um, I think that Europe is in a very good and important barrier and safeguard to prevent against this kind of rise. Strictly derived from the European model, Australia, Japan, Canada, et cetera.

In this country we have the public service that has a certain number of duties, a certain amount of obligation and contract with the citizen. This, if we're able to preserve a certain number of values like independence, the pluralism, the quality programs, the respect to the minority, support of the language, support the mission production of content, this is the best barrier, but cannot survive against any will. Because if the legislation doesn't support, if the rules do not support, if there's not a common agreement with the new forces of the market coming in, this will be wiped out. This will be considered as part of the past. This will be considered as part of an old

system where you want to regulate. The citizen can do whatever he wants and it's the market that will decide.

>> Andrea Renda: Thank you very much, Giacomo. I will, um, pass the floor immediately to Pilar, although, certainly what Giacomo has said will raise questions and issues as well as the previous speeches. We need to save time because otherwise we will not have time for interaction for the other panelists, I'll give the floor immediately to Pilar.

>> Pilar del Castillo: Thank you very much, I want to be brief first because so many things have been said to the moment, second because I don't like to have the intention of being the prototype that Eli has said. I can say something and be contrary at the same time.

It is amazing, uh, in all the speeches, previous speeches, I found myself in the way I address this point but it's amazing, when I was listening to Eli, the conclusion is the same. I want to ring in my final conclusion, it's incredible, we have different ways to get the same conclusion and what could be done in that sense to boost at least, media pluralism in internet.

When I was thinking on that, I start to, from the point of the offline, uh, you know, world, when you're offline and you address media pluralism, it is more or less watching the different legislation. You have the National Regulatory Authority for Competition. Concentration of media and dominance, you know, situation in the market or you have core fundamental rights. Like not having access or discrimination and so on.

But how you can translate all these to internet. First of all, you have a problem of the nature of internet and you look how the, the information, uh, works in internet, you have to think on the particular free character of the internet, what information is constantly migrated with the sector of the organizations active in the way is extremely dynamic and also with the system of highly fragmented and differentiated number of entities that collects, processes, changes and transmits information. All of this represents radical changes that must be considered in order to warranty the appropriate function of media pluralism. At the top of that, it is what you said, Eli, there is, for the nature of internet, for the capital intensity that is needed in order to be the, as media, then the possibility of the pluralism regarding media is much higher.

So, you have such a scenario, what can you do? The first problem is that you cannot act through national laws, you are in a global landscape. So that's a big problem compared to the, you know, the offline, uh, situation.

But then, it is not, it's not enough with the universal declarations and all these general agreements, international agreements because as is basic principles, universal principles,

and are not, uh, you know, uh, pragmatic, cannot operate in, in real situations. And, uh, once you have also these obstacles, the only ways to tackle at international level, at global level. It is very clear you cannot have a proper law to intervene in that sense. Not in the sense of intervening the market, but in the same sense you do it at national level. The only way of going on with this, I thought, was community standards. In more or less, uh, the way you put it. I mean, I think, I've got to finish with that because I would like to have some time, as you for the debate, but I'm going to, to literally, uh, tell you what I wrote as my final conclusion for that and you will have to understand, we have so much close, I said, well, we must promote international corporations, and then I put an example, when we are dealing with standards of technology nature. It's stimulating. When this happens in the ICT sector, we've been able to develop technical standards such as the different internet protocols, 3G standards for electronic communication that make possible for Europe, for example, to be the leader in the mobile sector, for awhile, at least.

And with all this, we have a lot worldwide interoperability. And today, in my view, there is a need for a different type of standards. There is a need for a set of common standards, international standards, in order to boost, to warranties, maybe you know, big wars, but to boost, foster media pluralism in the internet age. And I think sooner or later, it is what we, also governments, have to confront with. At the level of European Union, coming from the commission has been the one that proposed and going to European Parliament and to the conceal, would be a need for facing these kind of problems of media pluralism and others, I have to say through a set of common standards. Doesn't mean that only government have to act for that, those, as you said, that the, that are players in internet, you know, they have to, to play a role, but I think that is the, the path we have to follow, we have to, to try to, at the end, to have, you know, a set of common standards that make this possible in internet. Thank you.

>> Andrea Renda: This is dangerously become concrete policy work. So what I propose to do, I will give the floor to another panelist. Janet. You can come to the podium or I will step down. After Janet's speech, I will open the floor to questions. Be ready to propose questions and we'll have ail final round-up with two more panelists that I'll introduce later on. We started 15 minutes late, so I don't know if we can recover those 15 minutes, but we'll try to be as quick as possible. Janet from the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe. The floor is yours.

>> Janet: Can you hear me, all? I'd like to go straight into the topic. And focus on a few aspects of media pluralism and on the term of media pluralism, what do we mean by media pluralism? It has been mentioned here, but I'd like to summarize it a little bit. Pluralism of content has been mentioned, pluralism of media outlets, TV stations, online media and so on, blogs and so on. We need a pluralism of owners. When I say owners, I mean, you know, publishing houses, I mean media outlet owners, I mean ISPs, owners of distribution networks, online and offline. But most importantly, and this is what Giacomo said earlier, we need pluralism of sources, not just different opinions, um, geographical sources, not just sources from different societal groups, I mean different sources of media.

Online media, offline media, print, TV, we cannot talk about media pluralism online without talking about media pluralism offline. If we have, if we could only have the internet and a lot of media pluralism on the internet, it wouldn't be real media pluralism. It'd just be noise. We need professional media, journalists who analyze, evaluate information, who contextualize information. In order for us to make sense out of it. And this is why, um, I think it's important to, to stress this. The different media we have now, and we will also see maybe in ten years from now on, or twenty years from now on, there'll be another media coming up, we'll have the same debates all over again. It's all these different types of media, print, TV, online media, blogs, social media, they all fulfill different functions and they also lead to a different form of news consumption. Let's take the U.S., uh, elections now.

Like we all got the results very quickly, we knew who won, but all the background, we were reading our newspapers at home, we switch on the TV, um, if you want to watch, uh, what is happening in Syria, we don't go on YouTube and search for videos, we wait for BBC to do this for us, to select these videos. Breaking news, I mean, at least I can't remember a case where breaking news appeared first on the internet. Not even the Vickie Lake early cable, they had to do it in tandem with traditional media, at least operating online.

So I think it's insufficient to talk about media pluralism online without mentioning the offline aspects. It takes a lot of debate on the internet and free internet to have multiple sources available.

First, end we shouldn't forget, we're still the minority here, the minority of the world accesses the internet and has a sufficient and stable broadband connection, we don't even have it in this room by the way. And second, I also, I already mentioned, we need a healthy print market and I think print is very underestimated. We need local newspapers to scrutinize

local politicians, just, I mean, it is actually local newspapers that are dying out. In the U.S., a lot of regional and local ones had to close. In Germany, this is also the case. So we shouldn't fall into this illusion. Pluralism of opinion or of sources and free internet. We'll do the job. Because also, what is an opinion worth if, uh, no one sees it or watches it. This is, I like what you said Anja, with your grassroots project. There's a point here, I don't want to be too pessimistic, but, uh, and I'm not saying we don't need online media and would well be off with the traditional aspect of it, but, I mean, journalists today need to be skilled in a different way than a few years earlier. We also need, um, a plural and open internet because the internet now has traditional media to be seen and watched in places where traditional, where it wasn't possible so far. It's just a lot of easier to get a signal in a far away and a mountainous area. With terrestrial technology, it wasn't possible before. Journalists have a larger amount of sources today than they used to have before.

So, I would like to leave it just maybe one example of Macedonia, or the Balkans in general, six or seven years ago, there was media pluralism being established there. In the bloody war, the beginning of the 90s. They were hopeful things would move the right way. In the meantime we have, unfortunately in some of the countries in the Balkans we have a crack down of traditional media, close down of TV stations, newspapers or in other countries, we have a polarized media system. We have the pro and antigovernment media which isn't media pluralism. It's two opinions, not more. But we have an open internet. But alone, it will not help. You first need to establish pluralism with what you had before, the traditional, the traditional media in order, that's my personal opinion, in order to have order over media pluralism. Of course we could talk about the term of public space, what is public space with new media and how much do we need a public space in order to speak about the same issues? How much do we all need to see the same pictures to engage in a meaningful debate or to what extent is it fragmented. Thank you.

>> Andrea Renda: Thank you very much, Janet. I will ask if there are comments from the audience, please be quick in your comments, also because we have two final speeches we need to have, and I promise they'll be very interesting. I see three hands, uh, do we have wireless? We can start here and go to the lady there and the gentleman here. Please introduce yourself before asking the question and please be brief to the extent possible.

>> My name is Courtney Raj from Freedom House. I vetch agree with things you said, but very much degree with other things you said. Part of trying to get this debate to go further than it's

been, we have to get past this idea of platform-specific media. We can talk about print media or newspapers, but in many cases, there's just convergence across platforms, so it doesn't make sense to talk about online media as if it's something different than broadcast or than print. I'd also, um, point out that the European and U.S., um, examples of a dying newspaper industry doesn't hold across the world. In the Middle East we've actually seen an increase in newspapers. So I think that's important to note as well and I think in terms of the case of journalists, that absolutely they still have a, an important role to play that some of it is still the same role and I think that we are in danger of seeing journalists just you know, becoming bloggers and the, playing that aggregating and curating role is going to become ever-more important. I was very glad to hear somebody else's comment about the danger of moving only onto you know, internet-generated media, because of the algorithms in place that can feed you only content that you believe in. It's interesting to hear how you might encourage that diversity so thank you.

>> Andrea Renda: There, yeah, she's coming to get the mic herself.

>> Now you can hear me? My name's Helen Goodman I'm a member of Parliament in Westminster in Great Britain. For the first time I've been in a session where I've agreed with every single member of the panel. I thought the analysis was excellent, but just on solutions, um, most western governments anyway, are facing massive fiscal deficits. So I think the idea that the public purse is going to pay for new sources of journalism is somewhat unrealistic and I mean, in Britain, we're spending $5 billion, already, through the BBC and tax breaks. Um, I wondered whether one thing to look at with the problem of concentration was to go via the WTO and look at that route because there we do have an international forum that can address some of this anticompetitive behavior.

>> Hi. Hello. My name is Costos. I work as a journalist in Greece. One of the countries that face the problems and I'm here as a presenter of the European Youth Forum. I agree with one of the things that Janet mentioned. I'd like to add with the WikiLeaks case. If we've overestimated the media, when the WikiLeaks case came up, they went to the New York Times and The Guardian in order for them to analyze and scrutinize all the information. Point that out, we've overestimated the, uh, the reliability of the new media and I don't agree with another thing that, uh, local newspapers dying is a bad thing. They could be replaced by local news sites, whatever name you call it.

Two questions for Eli. Did you mention, if I got it right that internet, media, news sites are more expensive, if I got it right? I didn't get your point there? Why they're more

expensive than traditional, uh, media sites, so many costs and if we have to see the internet as new media or just like, as an umbrella or a platform for all the traditional media. As you said, there was a revolution with the radio, television and the rest came out, now we can see television, we can hear radio and we can read newspapers through the internet. It's a platform for like, aggregated for all the media that exists up until now. That's all I wanted to say, thank you.

>> Andrea Renda: Thank you very much, I hope we get time at the end for replies. I'm sorry I have to cut the questions, we are running out of time and have two more speeches. What I'll do, Rohan, if you agree with me, I'll try to provoke you by reading, uh, the message that I received, uh, from, uh, one of the panelists, we're supposed to have today, remote participants, Sana Salaim was trying to connect to the session. She was mostly blaming some of the online intermediaries for this and she concluded her message by saying "ironic that I wasn't able to connect because of internet censorship issues here in Pakistan." I want to provoke you with that because part of the, uh, issues that have been raised here also, touch upon the problem of internet governance and the problem of internet architecture, something that by itself can be conducive to access to content and also the possibility of expressing one's self more freely, right? I was wondering whether you could tell us something about how do you see the architecture of the internet becoming more or less conducive to pluralism and freedom of expression in the weeks to come?

>> Fifteen years ago or so when I was working on issues of scarcity of attention and audiences, we used the terms audiences and meta audiences to differentiate between people actually dealing with the kinds of things our Greek colleague was talking about, that is a website that is read by particular individuals and sort of the larger ecosystem in which the website would function, involves connectivity and so forth.

The idea that there'd be economies of scale in assembling these meta audiences and somebody like Andrew Sullivan who got into it with low entry. This is in a way, things that have been known and said for a long time. The issue with the internet, as our Greek colleague was saying is that the barriers are low. As Eli himself was saying, there are possibilities for niche players to come in, even though they will never become as big as or as powerful as the major, the power, uh, distributor, distribution, uh, suppliers. Media attention aggregators.

So it is in this context that there is some value in looking at, uh, plurality policy issues in a classical way which looks at it in terms of what [breaking up] -- rather than what harm can private actors do to this? Obviously we don't rule out private

actors doing harm, but to look at the harm that [breaking up] -- in terms of blocking, sensoring, et cetera. And we could look at telecommunications, uh, policy changes that are [breaking up] -- allowing the internet to connect to, to flourish, et cetera, was an area where the government's ability to intervene and sensor and control, at least in terms of barriers to entry.

Now the issue is with the World Conference on International Telecommunications that is going to take place in Dubai in early December. There's the probability that some of the proposals that are being heavily advocated, for example, for something calls sending party network base, uh, there would be, there would be incentives for the creation of gateways of the form you find in, uh, China and of the form that you find in Bangladesh. In the case of China, the gateways are created for multiple purposes including censorship. In the case of Bangladesh, the gateway is there simply so the government can control the revenue stream and take quite a bit of it.

So what a number of European actors, for example, who are part of this, do not appreciate is that what was being pushed as a European problem to solve some revenue problems of European Telecom operators has now been taken up by the Arab states and the proposal has been transformed into one where the governments decide what is appropriate. The governments will decide what the routes are and so forth.

And sadly, for the Telecom operators who are pushing this, they will not get to see much of the money if there is any money. Probably the money will be taken by the governments.

So in this situation, if you have gateways, even for economic purposes, the possibilities, we're now talking about design, this is a design that is more conducive to government censorship than less conducive. I'm not saying it's determined that it will happen, there's all sorts of weird stuff that is going on in Bangladesh that the government doesn't control. The government does sort of sledgehammer stuff these days. YouTube isn't permitted in Bangladesh, but that will go for a couple weeks and then it will come back. It's not that it's being used for censorship right now, but that this particular model has more possibilities, it's more conducive to, uh, a plurality, hostile environment than the one we have now.

Therefore, I have made it my basis to go and oppose these proposals for this and many other reasons, thank you.

>> Andrea Renda: This was Rohan Sendovia [phonetic] from Asia. I might ask Anja and Giacomo to get back on stage. We won't have chairs for everybody. You can stay here, Rohan, but I can ask the panelists to give us a final statement, just one statement and then I have Maciej Tomaszewski from the European

Commission wrap up with what's been said. Can I start with Eli, just one statement and the rest we'll do offline.

>> Eli Noam: There were good comments here. Let me respond to two that were interrelated. I was interested with the platform neutrality that was mentioned, but I have to say that in a way, platform neutrality shouldn't mean that restrictions that are posed on traditional media for reasons that were specific to that technology now have to become legacy for anything new. Instead, they should be removed on the old media. Broadcast television was limited for reasons of physics and otherwise, and a set of rules around that limitation. To take those rules based on limitation to an abundant medium, to me, makes no sense. Now it's different to, of course, one should not have tobacco, rules on tobacco advertising that are different from one medium to another, but this should be media-neutral rules that apply to newspapers and magazines and to radio broadcasting and to internet. Equally. But it doesn't mean that other restriction-oriented rules should apply. I think what the European Union did recently or I don't know two years or whatever ago to impose broadcast rules on so-called, um, linear or television over the internet are really misguided. Now I don't think, kind of the basic idea behind it is misguided, should be child protection, all kinds of other rules, but they should not apply to television, they should apply to general media, including internet and including television. And not just kind of say, we are miserable, we broadcasters are miserable, let everybody be equally miserable with us.

Now that also goes -- okay, yeah, that also goes to the issue that Helen raised about the purse. See the financing of new media, the existing system is such that broadcasters, in effect, in some countries get a tax and that tax and license fee, whatever you call it is given exclusively to them, even if people don't want to watch public broadcasting. It seems to me, this is a bizarre system. If you have a tax, you should give it to whatever new, kind of great programs are being produced, not just to any particular institution.

>> Andrea Renda: Thanks, Eli, Peggy? You're fine? Anja, do you want to add anything? Giacomo? You don't need to comment on the miserable statement.

>> Giacomo Mazzone: Neither on the license fee that is a result of years and years of fight. Because the [breaking up] state budget that I think is even more weird. Um, the, I just wanted to talk about mythology that is around the internet. According to the last analysis, the last research, it exists only at the very beginning of an internet market. As long as newcomers to the market, the same market, when the mobile internet access is available, they discovered the internet that

is available, they cannot access before. I have at least ten movies I'm still watching all around the global since years that aren't available in any support in any form, but I'm still looking for it, one day I will catch, I'm sure.

But this effect ends once all the people access the market. The problem is that you need to input in the material bucket, something at the very beginning. Because, if there is no new creation, there'll be no long tail. The things in the long tail are most difficult to access. The first Buddy Allen movies that nobody watch anymore, in black and white. If they're not produced anymore, you will not access anymore.

>> Andrea Renda: Janet? Just one single statement? >> Janet: Just quickly on possible solutions and how we, or

the state or whoever can help finance qualitative content, I think one of the solutions, is we have to be ready to pay for it, all of us, whether this is like for public service broadcasting or content on, on the internet or content you know, broadcast via TV or whatever forms that might be, we have to do away with this culture of, uh, you know, this free culture of content, I think. So what this was with Eli said in the beginning, in the end, we have to pay for premium content. That's all.

>> Andrea Renda: All right, adds even more food for thought. To be discussed in other sessions.

>> Mine is a request to you. I'd like very much in conclusion to follow some of the lines that were you know, debated here. And then, uh, I think, uh, there'll be, I don't see another way, you know, on the context of CEPS, maybe there's room to do something more. I found something very interesting.

>> We certainly are planning to open a working party, a task force on this topic and those of you who want to be involved, uh, also in the audience, please come leave your contacts so that we can contact you.

Now, uh, Rohan has been speaking recently, I don't give you the floor anymore, I give the floor to my co-organizer, Maciej Tomaszewski.

>> Maciej Tomaszewski: It's not going to be an easy task summing up, what I would shortly summarize, what I noticed from all the speakers that basically we passed a phase when we had concern with internet bringing media pluralism, it would allow everyone to express et cetera. Here we had, uh, very clear discussion that we have to be aware that there are dangers concerning this issue. So, what would be important would be first of all to have a good mapping exercise concerning this issue and here we'd have to focus, not only on the situation on different markets, so in, uh, in Europe and United States, and different countries, to see what are the concrete, uh, concrete problems in those markets and also, to see, uh, what are the

concrete problems related to different media. As it might appear that for instance, for broadcasting, for newspapers, we might, uh, see completely different, uh, well completely different challenges. And, uh, from also, from what I noticed from the discussion that, uh, we, I think we are in a moment where we need to seriously consider, uh, good, uh, well brave solutions. And I've noticed that there was a discussion concerning, uh, for instance, creation of, adoption of, uh, of some kind of common standards, uh, to, uh, to reflect upon some instrumentation in international law, to reflect upon interoperability, may be concerning copyright. Also we had a lot of discussion about financing.

So, just to, uh, explain you what the European Commission is doing is this field that we are actually also focusing right now on the face of mapping exercise and in order to do that, we, we are, we have two groups dealing with this issue. First of all, this is a group that already finished its deliberation. EU Media Futures Forum, this was a group designed to discuss the economic situation of media as we consider that, uh, the proper reflection on this issue is needed to ensure media pluralism in Europe.

And secondly, what we are now, uh, also dealing with, it's a high-level group on media freedom and pluralism and this is a group that would more focus on the political issues concerning media pluralism. And this group should deliver its recommendations in December, January 2013 at the latest. And based on those recommendations, we'll try to define the best possible policy in, in those areas.

So far, for instance, for high level group on media pluralism, we're still waiting for detailed recombinations. We don't know what to expect but that was also the aim of those, of those two exercises of those two groups to create two multi-stakeholder groups that would independently tell us what exactly should be done. And to, just to finish, uh, those mapping exercises, I don't want to enter into details concerning the history of European Union, but it is often said that European Union or its predecessors were created mostly as economic, as an economic community and the thing is, we are dealing with those kind of issues, for instance, media pluralism is relatively new. Basically, also, what we're doing, for instance, the intermediary of European Universe Institute is to prepare a detailed study that should be prepared soon to see exactly in which areas we can act, what kind of legal basis we can have to ensure media pluralism.

So these are three important initiatives we have in the area of media pluralism and basically we're just waiting for results and, uh, I really hope that in one year, when we meet during the

next IGF we'll be able to present to you our detailed ideas on this issue.

>> Andrea Renda: Thank you very much, Maciej. I think it is really time to close the session and I think all of you, the ones that have left over time because the time was, uh, it's time now to go to other workshops. I thank all the panelists, uh, that have given an outstanding contribution of this debate. So, uh, thank you very much, we follow these up with documents with, uh, a discussion on, uh, and policy recommendations and this will be also left open to further contributions even from you that have participated. Thank you very much.

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