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AUDIOVISUAL MEDIA SERVICES: INPUT SOUGHT ON DRAFT WHITE PAPER
- 31 July 2023
- Communications & Digital Technologies
- SA Legal Academy
Please note: On 4 September 2023, the deadline for input was extended to 8 September 2023.
The Department of Communications & Digital Technologies has called for input by 8 September 2023 on ‘a new vision’ for audio and audiovisual media services and ‘online content safety’. While this type of policy document usually takes the form of a Green Paper, it has instead been gazetted as a draft White Paper.
Among other things the paper explores:
- a licence framework for audio and audiovisual content services, with thresholds based on annual turnover
- content regulation
- ownership, ‘plurality’, competition and investment, and
- support for domestic production and the local creative industries sector.
An executive summary of the paper refers to a raft of concrete proposals, including:
- a ‘technology-neutral approach’, with the aim of facilitating growth and investment
- levelling the playing field between competing services by ‘imposing … public interest obligations on licensees’
- maintaining the existing three-tier broadcasting system, anchored in ‘a stronger public broadcaster’
- repealing ‘enabling provisions’ in the prevailing ‘must carry’ regulatory framework
- retaining local content quotas
- ‘imposing a 2% turnover tax on digital platforms’
- extending free-to-air and free-to-view listed event access to the broader audio and audiovisual content services market
- protecting ‘the sustainability and viability of free-to-air services’ by way of regulations
- prescribing a code of conduct for on-demand content services
- strengthening and regularly reviewing statutory prohibitions against piracy and the circumvention of technological protection measures
- streamlining and fast-tracking the internet service provider removal and site blocking process ‘upon notification by verified rights holders without the need to approach the courts’
- imposing regulatory measures to address concerns about economic concentration and the abuse of market dominance by multichannel digital service providers, and
- relaxing existing limitations on foreign and cross-media ownership.
It is envisaged that a strengthened, more efficient Independent Communications Authority of South Africa would be retained as ‘content regulator’, with Sentech as the ‘common carrier’. The Minister would be responsible for spectrum policy, planning, allocation and co-ordination.
- draft White Paper
Published by SA Legal Academy Policy Watch