Sharing killed the AVMSD star: the impossibility of European audiovisual media regulation in the era of the sharing economy

Indrek Ibrus,Ulrike Rohn

doi:10.14763/2016.2.419

Abstract

The paper focuses on the challenges that the ‘sharing economy’ presents to the updating of the European Union’s (EU) Audiovisual Media Service Directive (AVMSD), part of the broader Digital Single Market (DSM) strategy of the EU. It suggests that the convergence of media markets and the emergence of video-sharing platforms may make the existing regulative tradition obsolete. It demonstrates an emergent need for regulatory convergence – AVMSD to create equal terms for all technical forms of content distribution. It then shows how the operational logic of video-sharing platforms undermines the AVMSD logic aimed at creating demand for professionally produced European content – leading potentially to the liberalisation of the EU audiovisual services market. Lastly, it argues that the DSM strategy combined with sharing-related network effects may facilitate the evolution of the oligopolistic structure in the EU audiovisual market, potentially harmful for cultural diversity.

Highlights

From the human rights perspective, the Council of Europe has repeatedly addressed that issuing licenses for a right to publish content on the internet would be harmful to freedom of expression
At the heart of this endeavour is the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD), but the broader framework for this is its Digital Single Market (DSM) strategy, which means that several other directives and instruments will be changed – all due to the perception that media convergence and related market developments are about to make existing regulations outdated and unaccommodating to the contemporary situation
The convergence of the regulatory traditions of television on the one hand and the internet on the other promises to be challenging and is expected to bring about the dropping of one of the two. This is due to the very different rationales of these regulatory traditions – TV regulation being the domain of cultural policy making, while the related internet regulation in the European Union (EU), formulated in its E-Commerce Directive, is about the regulation of service markets, based mostly on economic rationales and aimed at safeguarding entrepreneurial freedoms in the internet space

Summary

DEFINING SHARING ECONOMY

The ‘sharing economy’ is a concept that has received a lot of attention in both academic and popular writing in recent years Various new operations that rely on the Web 2.0 logic of coordinating the actions of network participants and marketing their operations as ‘sharing’ are, as demonstrated by Slee (2015), potentially about organising established services differently in order to circumvent existing market regulations. Such activities tend to result in harsh free-market practices being extended into previously protected areas of people’s lives, pushing vulnerable individuals to take on unsustainable risk. Services such as Uber are in reality just expressions of neoliberal capitalism under the mask of the sharing economy

THE SHARING ECONOMY IN THE MEDIA

THE SHARING ECONOMY MAY CONTRIBUTE TO MEDIA CONCENTRATION

SINGLE MARKET

Findings

CONCLUSION