city university london school of social sciences convergence of ...

2. CONVERGENCE AND ITS REGULATORY EFFECTS2.1. Concept of ConvergenceThe process of convergence was first mentioned in the academic literature in the1970‟s. One of the earliest expressions of the idea came from Nicholas Negropontein 1978. „He used three overlapping circles to represent the technologies ofcomputing, printing, and broadcasting. The most rapid growth and innovation, heargued, could be found in the area where the three intersected. Negroponte hadoverlooked the telephone system, but simultaneously, telecommunications‟(Mueler:1999 p.12).After its first usage in the literature, many colleagues attempted to define the termbut there is not a commonly accepted definition of the convergence in the literature.According to Lind (2004), „it was not just the business community who embracedconvergence without reflecting about how to define the term or its deeper meaningand implications. Most academic articles the last decade mentioning convergencehave taken it as a given and just dealt with different implications of the phenomena.Almost no academic articles have tried to define convergence and relate it to atheoretical framework‟ (p.2).EC‟s „Green Paper on the Convergence of the Telecommunications, Media andInformation Technology Sectors, and the Implications for Regulation‟ (Green Paper)which is the most quoted source for definition of convergence, defines the term as:„the ability of different network platforms to carry essentially similar kinds ofservices, or the coming together of consumer devices such as the telephone,television and personal computer‟ (EC:1997, p.1).In most of the definitions of the term, its characteristic is emphasized to “blur theboundaries”. For example, OECD has defined convergence as a buzzword in theinformation industry „which blurs the technical and regulatory boundaries betweensectors of economy‟ OECD:1992, p.13). Similarly, Fransman (2000) definesconvergence as „the blurring of borders between telecoms, computing and media‟(p.39). Choi and Valikangas (2001) similarly defines the term as the blurring of10