Amateur 'video bloggers' under threat from EU broadcast rules

In another attempt by government to get their brains, and therefore laws and taxes, around new technology, the EU wants to force video bloggers to obtain broadcast licenses. I've written elsewhere that American big government (old style liberals, new style conservatives) have nothing on European governments. In Germany, at least, to watch television in your own home, you have to buy an annual license. European governments love licenses.

This is obviously crazy. The British Broadcasting minister has this deep insight: "But video clips uploaded by someone is not television." I would say "duh" but this insight appears too deep for the EU people trying to say it is so they can get their license fees.

Back to my German experience. You had to pay a license fee for the TV, but also for radio. So if this move against the vlog works, how long before podcasters get tagged as radio broadcasts?

Update In thinking more about this, this is just another example of the difficulties governments have in addressing the internet. The natural instinct is to apply rules appropriate to old media, such as television and radio, to the new technology to which it is at least superficially similar. This move by the EU is not against video bloggers specifically, but more generally is a move to address video media distribution on the web, a very common type being the vlog.

With the growth of broadband, the internet is starting to look a bit like the new cable. TV networks are starting to stream their shows over the web for those who missed it on TV and didn't Tivo it. AT&T is launching what is basically a cable TV service distributed over broadband internet. There is no technical barrier to creating an entertainment network, broadcasting original content (some sit-coms, the requisite CSI knock-off or two, a singing-based contest show) over the web, and sooner or later someone will try it. (Probably in the porn business, since they tend to be first in embracing new ways of distributing their product.)

With this in mind, it seems natural to then apply TV regulations to the web. There is a basic problem, though. In the TV world, there are only a small number of producers: the stations and networks. In the web world, there are millions. Anyone can be a producer. So rules that in the old media world applied only to a small number of large companies would now be applied to ordinary people too.

It's the same problem that came up a couple years ago with blogs and McCain-Feingold. Those regulations were written with old media in mind. Nobody thought about how to handle the millions of bloggers who might write about a candidate or include a link to the candidate's website.

These problems have arisen in dealing with voice over IP technology, which looks an awful lot like telephone communication, web radio, which looks an awful lot like traditional radio, etc. It just goes to show you really can't simply old media rules to the new media of the internet. What makes sense in one domain does not make sense in the other.