Digital Media in Italia Un'iniziativa per interrogarci sul ruolo dell’Italia e per programmare il nostro futuro

 Response to European Commission's Consultation

Digital Media in Italia (dmin.it) is pleased to respond to the European Commission's Consultation with its proposal designed to maximise the flow of digital media[1]. Although the proposal has been designed with Italy in mind, its applicability is broader and, if implemented, could help bring about the full benefits of digital convergence.

We identify three areas requiring intervention: content distribution and consumption, broadband network and online payments systems. For each area we propose specific lines of action, analyse technological, economical and legislative/regulatory aspects, and highlight potential advantages.

The dmin.it proposal is based on two principles: (i) preserving a correct competition dynamics in the relevant markets. This includes maintaining the operators' broadest freedom as to the most convenient technological solutions and (ii) facilitating the broadest fruition of content and services by all citizens. This includes selecting suitable access and interoperability criteria and protecting them with appropriate regulatory and consensus-seeking action.

Such criteria are expressed as follows: 

• For content: a content provider who holds exclusive distribution rights to content for a given delivery system must also offer that content, on the same delivery system, via an interoperable Digital Rights Management (iDRM) technology adopted at the national level. Such a technology,  together with its protocols, standards and governance criteria, will offer to each operator the security levels it needs and will guarantee that:
  • Any consumer will be able to access all content distributed on a given delivery system by using a single type of device that is open and interoperable. As an analogy, the device will have the same user functionality of the “single decoder” that the Italian law mandates for satellite broadcasting. A consumer will be able to select the device of his choice among those available on the open consumer electronics market realised according to public specifications;
  • Any provider will be able to offer content using the business model that he deems to be most convenient (e.g. clear-text distribution, pay TV, pay-per-view, ecc.) with the certainty that the DRM technology adopted is compatible with a broad range of end-user devices available on the open market. If the provider wishes to utilise proprietary DRM technologies to distribute content for which he has exclusive rights, he shall also distribute such content using the iDRM technology adopted at the national level. When doing so the provider may decide to replicate or not the business model adopted with content distributed using his proprietary technology;
  • Anybody will be able to offer services and hardware/software solutions using the standards and protocols of the platform, possibly requesting, when the platform governance rules so require, conformity certificates;
• For networks: any operator of a two-way network, such as the Internet, shall also include pure Internet access service in his offer. Such acces shall
  • Be "service agnostic" and therefore it may not assign different priorities to the transport of different types of information, unless this is requested by the user;
  • Be provided at non discriminatory conditions with respect to other offers of the operator;
  • Have technical characteristics (such as bitrate) that are already present in other commercial offers by the same operator;
• For payments: a consumer will be able to use “accounts” managed by account providers that are based on garanteed monetary circuits such as credit cards, bank accounts, prepaid cards, ecc. The state of the account will be aligned to the selected payment form at regular intervals or on demand thereby decreasing transaction costs.

We believe that the coordinated implementation of this proposal can lead to a stronger and more advanced national market for production, distribution and consumption of digital content.

The implementation of this proposal requires the development of an operational plan. To achieve this we envisage the need for a forum comprising representatives of all social, governmental and economic components in the country. We also anticipate that additional economic and legislative/regulatory interventions may be required.