Examination of Witnesses (Questions 317-319)
Mr Gregory Paulger and Mr Jean-Eric de Cockborne
6 NOVEMBER 2006
Q316Chairman: Can I thank you very much
indeed for meeting us. We are very grateful to you. I think you
know that we are a Sub-Committee of the House of Lords Select
Committee on the European Union which operates by a series of
delegated committees and we deal with all aspects of the internal
market. For the record, Mr Paulger, would you like to say who
you are?
Mr Paulger: My name is Gregory Paulger. I am
the Director responsible for a Directorate called Audiovisual
Media Internet; that is the subject matter of the Directorate
in the Commission and we are the directorate in charge of this
particular directive. To my right is Jean-Eric de Cockborne who
is Head of the Audiovisual Policy Department.
Chairman: We have seven broad areas we
would like to try and get through and I wonder if we could start
on the question of scope.
Lord Haskel: We consider the scope of
the thing to be central to the whole directive. We just wondered
what it is you are trying to achieve by the directive. Are you
satisfied that you have a workable definition of the various services,
the linear, the non-linear and the other things? What is the scope
of the directive?
Q317 Chairman: I should say that
throughout we will be talking, I assume, in terms of the revised
draft.
Mr Paulger: As you know, the first television
directive was adopted in 1989 and its regulatory architecture,
and indeed the substance of its rules, reflect the television
landscape of the 1980s where each Member State had two or three
mainstream channels and audiences were more or less captive. The
directive was and still is based on two Pillars. One of these
Pillars is the Country of Origin Principle and the other is the
set of co-ordinated fields, the fields in which the rules are
co-ordinated throughout Europe, and this combination allows broadcasts
to flow freely throughout Europe on the basis of the Country of
Origin Principle. In 1989 when the directive was adopted we were
on the eve of the explosion of satellite television. It was in
the eighties that we saw the number of channels available multiply,
first of all by tens and then by hundreds, so the directive provided
a very successful framework for this development. It was updated
in 1997 where some amendments that had become necessary were made.
For example, there were outdated rules that had the effect of
forbidding dedicated tele-shopping channels to come into existence.
That is a detail and it is one of the details that was sorted
out at the time, but basically the same architecture remained.
From about 1999/2000 onwards it became clear that this 1980s structure
was not going to be good enough for the first 20 years of the
21st century so there were increasing demands in the industry
and also in the European Parliament for modernisation of the directive.
There was an important report in the previous legislature by a
Mr Roy Perry, a UK MEP, which called for a new directive updating
the current directive, simplifying but also expanding the scope
to cover not just television but also television-like services.
This was followed up early in the current Parliament by a report
that went in much the same direction by a French MEP, Mr Henri
Weber. That sets the institutional context. The Commission responded
to this early on by launching a large scale consultation. In December
2001 we adopted a communication to the Parliament and the Council
announcing two types of measure. The first type was a measure
designed to plug the gaps, as it were, pending the revision of
the directive because we knew it would take a long time, and so
the Commission adopted what was called an interpretative communication,
notably on the advertising rules which had shown themselves to
be particularly out of date. They do indeed date from the 1980s.
We did as much as we could through interpretation and we also
announced the launching of a wide consultation using not only
the classic consultation procedure of hearings and on-line contributions
but also working through focus groups which were chaired by Mr
de Cockborne. There were three focus groups: one on scope, one
on advertising and one on the right to information. From all this
emerged the outline of a proposal that was discussed at a conference
organised with and by the UK Presidency in Liverpool last October
and the Commission then proceeded to produce its proposal. What
the proposal sets out to do basically is to extend the successful
internal market formula used by the current television directive
to TV-like services. We believe that, just as television has a
European dimension and a European economic dimension to it,—and
I am talking about trans-frontier channels—the emerging
services that deliver television-like programmes and compete with
television should be able to benefit from the same framework and
that, conversely, since they are competing with television there
should be a level playing field and the same basic rules of the
game should apply to those delivering similar services whatever
the delivery platform. I would summarise the two main aims as
providing the right internal market framework for competitive
industry to develop and creating a level for television and television-like
services.
Q318 Chairman: Can I come in on those
two points? What you have told us, and you have explained very
usefully the process by which we have got to the current position,
is that there are two driving forces to scope. One is to reform
the legislative framework for television services and the second
is, in your words, to extend television to TV-like services, in
other words to extend the scope, by which in shorthand I would
suggest you mean in some sense to liberalise further the regulatory
framework for existing television services in the light of the
modern era and then to extend the scope. I wonder if we could
separate out the two because in principle you could seek to liberalise
further the situation in existing television, whatever one calls
it, without doing anything in relation to extension or you could
seek to extend without liberalising. Why are you trying to extend
into TV-like services? You used two justifications. One was that
they should be able to benefit from this. I am a bit puzzled by
what that means. The second was that there should be a level playing
field. By going beyond TV services you are going into regulation
of some aspect of service delivery on the internet. That is correct,
is it not?
Mr Paulger: Yes.
Q319 Chairman: So the Commission
is getting drawn into seeking to regulate what is on the internet
on the justification of it being of benefit to those services
and a level playing field. Why should there be a level playing
field between television as traditionally known and what is on
the internet? Can you explain that? That is an assertion. Why
should there be a level playing field? They are different lots
of services.
Mr Paulger: The reason why we say "benefit"
is that we believe the internal market framework based on the
Country of Origin Principle is of benefit to companies because
the alternative is that companies that want to provide trans-frontier
services are faced with up to 25 or indeed 27 different sets of
national rules.
| 
