EU ‘Television Without Frontiers’ Regulations Widely Rejected

The European Union’s plan to regulate the net as if it were TV – Television Without Frontiers – picked up a lot of attention in blogs this week, after the Times covered it.

The basic idea is flawed – TV involves handing a monopoly over spectrum to organisations, so regulating how they use it makes some sense, but there is no spectrum scarcity online, as all you need is a webserver. So the EU limits on local content, advertising intervals and content labelling don’t fit at all.

I spoke about this on the Technorati videoblog last week, and the BBC’s Pods and Blogs show last night. You can hear me about 30 minutes into this show recording.