An Assessment of the Consistency of Hungary's Media Laws with ...

32 • Hungarian Media Laws in Europe
2/Media authority: centralised structure
• Finland’s Ficora shares regulatory responsibilities with the Ministry of Transport and
Communications; media in Finland area also supervised by a number of self-regulatory
bodies, including the Council for Mass Media and the Council of Ethics in Advertising.
• Italy’s AGCOM shares regulatory responsibilities with the Department of Communications,
the Parliamentary Commission for Public Service Broadcasting, the Antitrust Authority, the
Privacy Authority, the Professional Order of Journalists, and the courts.
• UK’s Ofcom has pursued a so-called “light-touch” policy, opting for co-regulatory schemes
involving different bodies, including with the Authority for Television On-Demand
(ATVOD), which oversees on-demand TV, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA),
which monitors advertising and marketing regulations for all media in the UK, and the
Secretary of State for Sport, Culture and Media, as well as the Secretary of State for Trade
and Industry.
Based on the above criteria, Hungary’s Media Authority has the broadest regulatory scope of the
three convergent regulatory bodies cited. As the expert assessments indicate, Hungary’s Media
Authority is the only convergent regulatory body among these examples that is responsible for
tendering, licensing and spectrum management and also has regulatory and sanctioning powers
over all media sectors.