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

service. Besides, regulators tend to provide a robust consumer protection mechanismtaking into account the converging services environment and this is another factorleading to improvements in consumer service quality. After all, it wouldn‟t be wrongto argue that convergence and its regulation have a positive effect on quality ofservice.Convergence is also „introducing new issues that may require regulation, includingsecurity, privacy and consumer protection‟ (Melody et.al.:2003, p.vii). Since itbecomes much easier to transmit information through internet and collectinformation regarding people, privacy protection and its regulation gain importancein a converging environment. It is stated by Henten et.al. (2002) that, consumerprotection is an important issue in a converging environment and „consumers mustbe protected against low quality products, late delivery or pure and simple fraud‟(p.24). As society is becoming more dependent on electronic communicationsnetworks and services, it is important for regulators to constitute a regulatoryframework addressing security and privacy problems in order to protect consumersand citizens.Intellectual property rights constitute another area where converged environmentcreates problems. Convergence, accompanied by the ability to access, distribute andmanipulate content creates a problem for intellectual property rights holders in termsof protecting their rights against infringements. In order to cope with this problem,some regulatory effort is needed. Taking into account that intellectual property rightsis an international issue that goes beyond the national boundaries, both nationalregulators and international organizations should consider this problem and takenecessary steps to prevent the grievance of intellectual property rights holders.3. REGIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL BODIES’ APPROACHES TOCONVERGENCE„In a world where service provision increasingly crosses national boundaries, withthe appearance of worldwide operators offering integrated multimedia services, it isessential to ensure that the national regulatory approach fits with the developinginternational framework‟ (ITU:2002 p.5). As highlighted by ITU, convergence is an25