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

different policy objectives‟ (p.30).It is a fact that once separated regulatory principals must also converge or a totallynew regulatory framework must be adapted to cover all communications industries,whether the convergence between telecommunications, information technologies andmedia industries takes place because of technological developments or politicaldecisions. Then the question arises: „How different should regulation to be to dealwith convergence? Any regulation aims at achieving both the efficient allocation ofresources and public interest goals (Clements: 1998, Kiessling and Blondeel: 1998).Even in a convergent environment, these goals will remain vital. To achieve thesegoals the regulator will need to provide potential participants and investors, as wellas users, with an environment that has some legal certainty (Clements: 1998, p.203).The current regulatory framework is being challenged by convergence and manyissues have already been raised that need to be resolved. Given the transition of themarket structure, policy makers and regulators would need to handle those issues offair competition, licensing and public interest goals‟ (Hukill et.al: 2000, p.298-299).The need to introduce legal frameworks and regulations to regulate aspects ofconvergence through a flexible and technology neutrality approach moved someregulators around the world to restructure their regulatory agencies towards anintegrated information and communication technology regulator. For example,OFCOM (Office of Communications) was established in 2003 by integration of fiveseparate regulatory agencies in UK, also telecommunications and broadcastingregulatory authorities are integrated and new communications authorities areestablished both in Hong Kong and Australia. Besides the integration of existingregulatory authorities, also some countries readjusted their broadcasting andtelecommunications authorities‟ field of work taking into account convergence suchas France.This study focuses on convergence of telecommunications, information technologiesand media industries with a regulatory point of view. As it is explained in depthbelow, a case study regarding Turkey is done and some regulatory proposals arederived in order to deal with the challenges posed by convergence and regulate6