The following is an excerpt from a speech delivered last month in Australia by Kim Dalton, director of television at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, that country’s leading public broadcaster.

In his presentation, Dalton argues that the country’s regulator should play a bigger role in the new media sector in order to maintain healthy levels of domestic content – a refrain often heard here at home. In fact, Dalton references findings from the CRTC’s recent New Media Project Initiative.

In this rapidly evolving digital environment, it is time to reassess and reshape the Australian content policy framework, because while the environment has changed, all the reasons for the original policy framework remain just as vital, especially the cultural reasons.

By making new connections between the previously distinct fields of communications, media and cultural policy, the government can address the issue of ensuring Australian content is available in the digital environment. The new connection recognises and fosters the dynamic dependency between the creative industries, the ability and capacity to innovate, and market development.

By pulling the right policy levers, the government can help to ensure that healthy, robust and growing creative industries have the ability to innovate, serving existing markets and creating new markets for Australian content in the digital environment.

So what are the options?

There are the existing policy mechanisms of direct and indirect funding for Australian content; it would be relatively straightforward to add to existing avenues of funding. There are the current Australian content regulations. Obviously this would be more difficult to change, although I would like to point out that, while many argue that the Internet cannot be regulated, Australian governments have been active in relation to regulating the areas of pornography and gambling.

In addition, the Howard government held out against the U.S. government and the U.S. film and television industries in negotiating the USA/Australia Free Trade Agreement and retained the right in the future to regulate in favor of Australian content.

So, difficult, but not impossible.

What other new policy levers are available to a government committed to maintaining a minimum level, at least, of Australian content for Australian audiences?

The Canadian government has done a great deal of work on this question. Through government agencies and private trusts, substantial funds are already provided to stimulate multiplatform innovation and content creation.

Last year, their New Media Project Initiative examined the issues around new media broadcasting, and looked at possible interventions in the new media market to ensure their broadcasting policy objectives are met.

They found that incentive measures may be more likely to succeed in the development of Canadian content on the Internet, rather than regulation, however, in some cases, incentive measures would benefit from a regulatory framework.

Some of the options they propose include:

• Content regulation of broadband Internet content, i.e., for linear or nonlinear audiovisual content made available on the Internet.

• Including new media or multiple platform distribution in the promises of performance or other licence-backed obligations.

• Applying diversity of programming genres regulation to broadband Internet content.

• Including new platforms more explicitly in the proposed terms of trade agreements between broadcasters and producers as requested of broadcasters in preparation for the forthcoming TV licence renewals.

• Developing terms of trade between the portals, ISPs and content developers, possibly through exemption regulations.

• Increasing existing new media funding to a level approaching traditional broadcast production funding.

• Making the promotion of Canadian new media content a Canadian broadcaster regulatory obligation.

The U.K. regulator, Ofcom, in its recently published Second Public Service Broadcasting Review observed that the emerging digital broadcasting and media system would not be able to deliver existing levels and diversity of U.K. content, and that new forms of funding would be required.

Some of Ofcom’s recommendations were direct public funding from hypothecated proceeds from spectrum auctions or spectrum charges, access to spectrum at below market prices and a wide range of industry levies.

The Australian Film Commission has also researched internationally the regulatory and funding options for broadband content, with similar findings.

Whilst all acknowledge that some of these measures would be challenging to implement, it would not be impossible. The AFC has found that in the last five years, significant moves have been made around the world to regulate areas which have been unregulated, to ensure policy frameworks are effective in the digital era.