ICT Policy For Networked Society - Ericsson

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Spectrum management. Ericsson’s positions for each issue including a brief introduction is provided below; detailed information on each specific issue can be provided on request. To identify new spectrum bands in the ITU and license them nationally is a ten-year process. The work carried out by regional bodies, such as CEPT for Europe, CITEL for the Americas, the Asia Pacific Telecommunity and the African Telecommunication Union lays the foundations for the introduction of products with standardized connectivity that can meet the requirements of businesses and consumers with respect to performance and affordability. The policy goals of global and regional harmonization efforts should be to enable: • Economies of scale • Easy cross-border coordination • Cross-border operation • Global roaming capabilities • Interoperability, choice and affordability • Efficient use of spectrum, also in border areas • Maximizing the economic and societal benefits of spectrum usage Network regulation. Investments in network infrastructure are long-term, large-scale undertakings that rely on confidence in the existence of stable market rules that stimulate such investments and the usage of broadband services. A typical national network costs billions of € to deploy and maintain, and has a payback time that can be greater than a decade. The continuous technological evolution gradually risks making past investments obsolete. Network investments are also upfront heavy, irreversible and once deployed the investments exhibit sunk cost characteristics. National market rules differ between countries due to legacy concerns. Active infrastructure competition should however be promoted as the primary tool to achieve competition in the provision of and usage of broadband services. In some situations open access publicly financed network deployments are necessary to change the dynamics of a market and/or to compensate for market characteristics such as low population density. Global standards should be the basis for all regulatory measures. Consumer and property rights need to be respected and should be balanced. Consumers should be entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice and run applications and services of their choice that comply with the terms of their service plans, including bandwidth limits and quality of service considerations, so long as it does not harm the network. 18 Network operators must be allowed the commercial freedom to offer tiered service plans in a competitive market and to tailor service offerings to meet consumer demands. Network operators must be permitted to employ transparent, reasonable, competitively neutral network management techniques, which may include prioritization or differentiation of classes of traffic, and to otherwise adjust network resources to ensure coverage, quality of service, and quality of consumer experience. Network Neutrality principles should not apply to competitive wireless networks since these are subject to capacity constraints due to varying demand and limitations in spectrum availability which have significant implications on network performance. Convergence. Convergence is a process that breaks up existing vertical service-specific value chains and technologies into a multitude of horizontal service offerings. Convergence is about services and about new ways of doing business and of interacting with society. [xxxvi] This technologically driven process can be understood by considering the new possibilities it brings to end-users, businesses and society. Convergence changes markets by transforming industry sectors, blurring historical market boundaries, changing the composition and range of possible market offerings and challenging the robustness of previously successful business strategies. From a policy perspective, converges enables increased demandside and/or supply-side substitution that can ultimately deliver more choice, competition and innovation. In a converging environment, a regulatory framework that treats similar services differently, for example on the basis of the technical platform, leads to inconsistencies and uncertainties that limit substitution. This prevents the market from fully benefiting from the opportunities provided by technological progress. A vertical and sectorspecific regulatory approach in an increasingly converged business environment amplifies the risk for unintended and dysfunctional market outcomes, suboptimal resource utilization and decreasing end-user value. Policy makers should increasingly consider a technology-neutral framework that treats the underlying platforms equally. Furthermore, as a principle the starting point of a regulatory implementation strategy should be the service in question not the platform that delivers the service. This should not be interpreted as a need to regulate all services but rather that those that do need to be regulated should be so based on the justification and desirability of certain goals and outcomes. The implementation strategy should be service-specific rather than platform-specific.
media/Content regulation. A multi-platform audiovisual policy approach needs to recognize the fast-growing availability and accessibility of audiovisual content in an environment with various complementary and alternative networks. In a multiplatform environment, the same rules and principles should apply to all technologies and distribution platforms. Media policy regulation should be technologyneutral and platform-independent. In other words, regulation of audiovisual media services should function irrespective of the underlying platform or means of distribution. The key elements that need to be present in a multiplatform approach are: • Support of open industry-wide standards for IP based media distribution via Set-Top Boxes, Connected TVs and IPTV. • A platform-neutral approach to regulation of audiovisual services. • Clear definitions of what constitutes an audiovisual service and a definition of audiovisual media service providers, along with a delineation of their responsibilities and obligations. • Mechanisms for fairly managing the competition within audiovisual distribution markets with tools that ensure the efficiency of program/content aggregation for the distribution market. • Copyright reforms that unlock barriers to multi platform, anytime, anywhere digital distribution. Internet content regulation is increasingly becoming a contentious issue. All regions and nations have their different norms, systems, values and sensitivities. When these norms are challenged by the progress of technology or development in society a rights-based policy approach typically challenges the established views. In addition, media convergence is another related development sometimes confused with Internet content regulation. However, converged media regulation is focused on the issue of how to systematically regulate the different types of professionally produced content classes in a converged environment: entertainment, current affairs reporting and cultural works. In this case the issue of editorial responsibility of a professional media publisher is of main concern. While Internet content regulation is fundamentally about free speech, the level of legitimate individual responsibility of a citizen (that is, legitimate limitations to free speech) and the level of expected responsibility of intermediaries enforcing these limitations are some examples of key concerns. Copyright. A revision in most countries of the current digitally restrictive copyright approach offers a unique opportunity for nations to set and lead by example. This is an opportunity that should not be missed. Through National Digital Agendas, policy makers can update the current state of play in the digital creative market by tearing down key structural barriers to making lawful (licensed and exempt) digital content widely available in an appealing, timely and user-friendly way. Policy makers need to address some of the fundamental barriers that hinder the possibility to reap and share the digital productivity and creativity gains that societies need. It is time to tear down barriers and solve the market supply failure of lawful (licensed and exempt) digital content. This failure is caused mainly by three structural barriers: • Limited availability of lawful digital content caused by “windowing”, exclusive licensing and territoriality Windowing refers to selling and re-selling products over time using various distribution channels, for example the film industry using cinemas, home video, rentals, cable, video-on-demand, and free-to air broadcasting. • Technology-specific copyright conditions including licensing, exceptions, safe harbors and exhaustion that limits or delays innovation of new services. • Unreasonable transaction costs make digital content unnecessarily expensive. A competitive and consumer-friendly digital content market and an appropriate legal framework to enable easy lawful (licensed) access to digital content are essential preconditions for the creation of a culture of lawful, rather than unlawful, consumption. Copyright enforcement policy should be developed from a clear evidence-based approach that is: • Fact-based. • Balanced to include all relevant stakeholders. • Focused on end-user demand. • Respects the right to privacy and freedom of communication. • Supports continued innovation in new technologies and services. • Promotes growth of lawful licensed digital services, and market efficiency. • Respects the relative nature of property rights such as copyright. • Avoids outsourcing, e.g. to ISPs, of private property enforcement. 19
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ICT Policy For Networked Society - Ericsson

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