The Washington Post is delivered in Canberra before most Washingtonians get it. It is dumped about two metres from the edge of my the front lawn. That’s where my computer terminal is _ on a desk next to the front window. It arrives about five or six hours before it hits the front lawn of suburban Washington houses because the Washingtonians have to wait for it to be printed on paper a delivered by petrol engine.
I call it up on a local telephone number, scroll through the headlines, get a paragraph summary of any item that looks interesting and if the summary is tasty enough, I can order the whole item. And there’s some pretty good stuff in there. Or I can download the whole lot unseen and take the notebook and read in peace anywhere in whatever typeface I want.
There was no Foreign Investment Review Board inquiry into why another American should own what is in effect another newspaper circulating in Australia. It just happened.
Orwell got it dead wrong in Nineteen Eighty-Four. He thought that the political masters would tightly control the information going to and from the elite while letting the proles do much as they pleased. Not so. At least in Australia.
With enough money, the information-rich can pull down CNN and download information from virtually any main US or British newspaper or newswire service, including the Reuters picture service on screen.
No; its the proles the pollies are worried about. Controlling what the proles hear and see and how much they pay for it dominates communications policy in Australia.
But while governments farnarkle around working out how they can do it, technology gnaws away like termites at the policy and regulatory foundations. Some major changes in communications can be expected in Australia in the next few years. Some have been set by governments, others by technology and others by business and people.
Some of the major government-set changes are: the end of the Telecom-Optus duopoly in 1997; the review required by the Broadcasting Services Act which will look at the three-to-a-market rule in free-to-air television; the continuing licensing process for pay television; the report on spectrum management in radio communications due next year; the inquiry by the Attorney-General’s department into copyright; and the continuing parliamentary surveillance of foreign ownership of print media.
Some of the major technological developments are: digital compression which will allow far more channels on one satellite; global satellite television networks with cheaper ground receivers; video compression so that video image can be sent down the present copper-wire telephone wires; developments in optic fibre, coaxial and MDS delivery; burrowing technology that will permit the laying of optic fibre without digging up streets; modem developments permitting greater text and graphics delivery down copper wires.
Business factors are fairly constant. Every business seeks to grow constantly (sometimes against its best interest); to eliminate or lessen competition horizontally; and to control all levels in the process of creating and selling its product. Another fairly constant factor in the media business is the market-to-costs ratio. For both print and electronic it costs 10 times as much to publish a local item than a national item and ten times as much to publish a foreign item than an international item.
People factors are also fairly constant. They want the receipt of information and entertainment to be easy and cheap. And as the profoundly depressing television ratings published weekly in this newspaper show, they prefer the crass and the emotive over the subtle and the sensible. Further, there are only 24 hours in the day to receive all this information. It is as much a competition for people’s time as for their money.
The mix of these developments is likely to affect people’s lives fairly significantly. It is a mistake to overestimate the effect of information-communication-technology change, but it is silly to underestimate it. The movie ü9 to 5 is a good example. In real life the oppression of Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton was not quelled by activism on the part of the female workers, but it is slowly being overcome as technology removes things like the typing pool. Viewed now, the typing pool in the film is now a stunning anachronism, yet we hardly noticed its removal nor the effects its removal have had in the workplace.
What governments do can be critical. They seem to want to do more and more and seem to get worse and worse at it, especially in communications.
In Australia the record of governmental interference in the information-communications business has been an especially dismal one. Government has rarely achieved the goals it set itself.
Politicians and their bureaucratic advisers have mouthed Australian ownership yet surrendered control of nine-tenths of mainstream print to foreigners and a third of television. They have mouthed the importance of localism in television yet surrendered nearly every local commercial station to the networks, castrating their ability to provide any worthwhile local content. And they have underfunded the ABC to the extent that Canberrans get their television news from Sydney.
They destroyed the healthy Sydney-Melbourne cultural competition by allowing networks to go into both.
They set up SBS to broadcast to Australian ethnic communities. Instead it has become the favoured broadcaster of the Anglo-intellectual elite, while the broad mass of migrants watch sitcoms on the commercials. It maybe a fine service, but it does not achieve the goal the politicians set it.
They set out to give Australians cheap, efficient pay television as soon as technically possible. Yet it has been conducted like a three-prize meat-tray raffle at a church fete in which the clergyman forgot to tell the ticket holders he was drawing third prize first. The resulting confusion has meant no-one has got the meat.
Even the very introduction of television in 1956 was accompanied by unnecessary delay and paralysing paranoia. And once introduced, governments failed to nurture what could have been a first-rate electronic-communications industry in Australia.
At other times, Australian-content rules and rules on children’s television were laughed at and requirements about fitness of licence-holders were treated with contempt as licences were on-sold like cattle stations.
Given that record and the menu of change in the medium-term term, people should take a greater interest in communications lest the dismal record continue.
To what extent can the government successfully regulate and how does it go about it? In the past week we have some evidence of a worthwhile change in regulatory thinking. The Australian Broadcasting Authority is to seek the public’s view on which television events should go on a list to ensure they remain on free-to-air television.
This thinking shows regulators are saying: “This is what you must do; this is what you must carry,” rather than: “This is what you must not do.”
Under this regulatory arrangement broadcasters will have to carry things like the Melbourne Cup, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, etc.
It may mean, of course, that for major sporting events the Government might have to provide the wherewithal for the broadcasters to do the job. Instead of, for example, the three free-to-air networks bidding against each other for rights to international events like the Olympics (Australians shooting each other in the foot), a common buying policy might have to be developed.
The “must-carry” policy would be aimed at meeting the needs of the masses and maintaining Australian cultural values, or at least governments will use that excuse so they can regulate. Whether it succeeds is another matter.
Three events in the past month, for example, have revealed governmental powerlessness in enforcing its own regulatory regime and its ability to tie itself in its own knots.
The Packer-Murdoch-Telecom consortium, miffed that it missed one the two pay-TV licences, has launched a court challenge to the process. The timing was critical _ as you would expect from a PMT consortium. It comes just before one of the successful tenderers, Australis Media, goes to the sharemarket for capital-raising. Big consortiums can frustrate regulatory intent by using the courts either in achieving delay or through judicial overturning of previous administrative decisions. The history of media administrative law shows that if you have enough money to hire the smart lawyers the first can be achieved in any case and you have about a 50-50 chance of achieving the second.
Incidentally, what horrible potential for a big vertical and horizontal monopoly lies with PMT?
The second event was the Trade Practices Commission (a government body) denying the ABC (another government body) the chance to link up with one of the commercial pay-TV players to gets its services to the paying public. Usually it is a case of the left hand of government not knowing what the right hand of government is doing. In this case, the left hand of government actively fights the right hand.
The third has been the announcement that a 10-channel cable service will be delivered to a few people who live near the Sydney and Melbourne CBD. It will be start with mainly US and European. Production of Australian material and rural services are a pious hope at some indeterminate time in the future. It will use Telecom, one of the PMT partners seeking a satellite licence.
While this is going on, it is possible an American player might make it all academic by putting a satellite over our heads. It is easy enough to receive. The only question is commercial: how to you get people to pay for it? Or will advertising raise enough revenue to make it worthwhile?
Further, video compression, optic fibre and other technologies might make current regulatory thinking obsolete. At present, governments, through licensing, restrict the number of broadcasters. They thus restrict the viewing menu. Also the broadcasters (pay and free) determine what is being played at any one time. Under this regime (six free and, say, twenty pay channels) only 26 different items will be playing on televisions throughout Australia at any given time. That sort of restriction makes licences more valuable and governments and big corporations more powerful. No small fry allowed.
New technology, however, will enable subscribers to dial in from home, choose a program (just like a video library) and download it (with advertising embedded). This would include the news. If I want the day’s news at 8.41pm, so be it. Or yesterday’s news at 6.12am or Fawlty Towers Episode Four at 11.23am, so be it.
Of course, the psychological need for contemporaneous viewing of sports events will give direct broadcasters some edge there, but in general, television will become a bit like newspaper reading: pick and chose what you want and when you want it. The telephone wires and optic fibres will support many, many more than 26 channels. In that climate you would have to wonder what all the regulatory fuss was about. Power moves from government, and the few oligopolistic broadcasters and their programmers whom it has licensed, to the viewers and the many unrationed service providers. The time slots in television program guides become meaningless. As do must-carry rules or Australian-content rules. You can lead the horses to water, but you can’t make them drink.
Also under threat will be Australia’s $600 million video-hire business. Cable and computer is a much cheaper delivery system than cars and shops.
What about other communications? The Telecom-Optus duopoly ends in 1997. Will foreign carriers be permitted after that? What future is there for rural subscribers’ cross-subsidies?
The telephone lines have the potential to end the rural disadvantage in information, education and employment and to significantly change urban and rural work habits.
Huge medical and legal references and encyclopedias are already on-line. And the costs are coming down. The National Library is coming to Gulargambone and Tangambalanga. A significant portion of the workforce are computer-data manipulators, and that’s all. They include journalists, accountants, booking clerks and a raft of other white-collar workers. They receive data (accounts, words, graphics) in a computer; they add something from their brain, from another computer database or from what someone tells them over the phone: they manipulate it and send it back into the database. That work can as easily be done at home, in cheaply rented space in a rural town as in a capital-city central business district. It will be even easier as optic fibre and computers become more powerful and cheaper.
Ironically, at the very time people will want more space at home to take advantage of doing at least some of their work there, governments are encouraging higher urban densities which will make this more difficult.
With the information highway the possibilities for vertical monopolies increase. The carrier can also provide the text and vision. At once Optus or Telecom becomes a television station, a newspaper, a library and a phone company.
In the Australia, another regulatory change is possible with the information super-highway. It is likely that newspaper companies will be deliver electronically in addition to their printed versions. Electronic delivery will also replace or run in tandem with magazine, journal and even book publication. That will bring those publications within the Federal Government constitutional powers under Section 51’s “postal, telegraphic, telephonic and other like services” provision. Previously paper publication was beyond its constitutional reach.
We should not, however, expect brave new worlds, or immediate transformations to new technology that dramatically change the way people live. Australians have shown they are resilient to sharp changes. But they have shown an enthusiasm for some new technologies beyond market prediction: VCRs, mobile phones and fax machines hugely outstrip purchases per head in most other developed countries. Perhaps it is a way of helping to overcome our tyranny of distance.
It is difficult to make firm conclusions about all this. Significant changes in communications are on the way. Governments have made a hash of managing them in the past. Big corporations have exploited that. Between them they have created artificial monopolies with big licence fees, special favours and high new-player barriers. The result has been at the cultural expense of Australian product and at the economic expense of the Australian people (as higher advertising costs are passed on) and perhaps to the political advantage of the government of the day.
There is no reason why this horrible pattern will not be repeated in the rest of this decade without some pretty serious debate and airing of the issues so they cannot get away with it again.
As the arrival of The Washington Post shows, the technology can be exciting, enriching and powerful. It can also be invasive, expensive and like all exotic species displace the native. It is going to be difficult to get the best of both worlds.