CPRF explores intersect of media, telco & Internet

Earlier this week a horde of Australian comms professionals (and myself) congregated in Sydney for the 2010 Communications and Policy Research Forum.

The Forum is an annual event organised by the Network Insight Institute and is heavily research oriented, narrowing its gaze on the state of media, telecommunications and the Internet.

UK-based academic Richard Collins gave an absorbing keynote on the health of the public media, stressing the impact the Internet is having on traditional public media.

Collins, a professor of media studies at the Open University UK, posits that the United Kingdom is experiencing a chain of early and intense media trends that will reverberate across the globe.

Advertising spend, for instance, is shifting online with startling rapidity. Internet advertising now takes a whooping 25 percent of the UK’s overall ad share, and is growing fast.

There is also rebalancing towards subscription-only online content, and the public service media is becoming increasingly embattled and less generously funded. The bloodbath of red ink in the newspaper sector will only accelerate, he says.

Collins argues that UK public media finance, the lion’s share of which goes to the BBC, should be spread more widely across a greater range of institutions, and that Internet-based crowd-sourcing models of news production could grow and thrive with the help of the public purse.

Other topics at CPRF included social media and net neutrality, online communities and applications, wireless broadband, the open Internet and copyright in the digital era.

With net neutrality, Elise Ball from commercial law firm Gilbert & Tobin said there is no one size fits all. Different versions abound. Australia, for example, is likely to see classes of content protected (e.g. television must-carry & anti-siphoning) rather than broad net neutrality principles.

Google’s Australia and New Zealand head of public policy and government affairs Iarla Flynn extolled the virtues of preserving the open Internet, while noting some worrying trends in the sophistication of Internet censorship. The Irishman took to the stage outlining Google’s tenets for openness – user choice in content, services and devices; level playing fields; reasonable network management practices, and transparency of information.

Recent Australian research showing the positive effect broadband has on productivity and economic development was presented, but, as in New Zealand, fibre demand-side is a hot topic - what will the NBN be used for, people asked.

The CPRF programme and summaries of all papers presented are available at:
http://www.networkinsight.org/events/cprf10.html#Does