It was with a sinking feeling that I read about Stephen Conroy’s enthusiasm for a review of the media regulatory framework yesterday.

And not merely because, as Margaret Simons and Glenn Dyer have pointed out, we’ve still yet to see what Labor’s media policy actually is, since they never released it in 2007 and Conroy has done nothing in broadcasting policy since.

But a review. Another bloody review.

Two things are worrying about a new round of regulatory reviews — apart from the obvious problem that no government has ever reviewed media regulation and actually made it any better.  One is Conroy’s expressed position on the point of the entire regulatory framework.  He said this at the Broadcasting Summit earlier this week

No matter how popular social networking becomes, or how many hits a video receives on YouTube, the knowledge that more than a million of your fellow Australians shared the moment when your footy team won the grand final is, I would say, irreplaceable.  The protection of that shared experience is the responsibility of all of us.

I had to read that a couple of times before its full import sunk in.  In short, Conroy wants to protect one media model — mass media — not for any economic reasons but because he likes “shared experiences”.

Given every single major media development in the past two decades has been away from mass media towards greater personalisation of services and greater empowerment of media users, it’s an extraordinary statement from Conroy.

The only two media sectors that have shown real growth in the past two decades have been online and subscription television.  Online has grown massively, more or less in the absence of government interference.  Subscription television has survived and, eventually, become profitable despite attempts by successive governments to cripple it by legislating away its capacity to offer high-value content.  It has only done so through innovation, rapid digitisation and handing greater control to viewers.

Conroy also said “the objective of protecting local content must remain at the centre of our approach to regulatory reform”.

Local content goes by another name, protectionism, and audiences have been running away from that too at a rate of knots as they’ve moved online.  Local producers — who benefit from this protectionism — will inevitably insist that Australians want to see “our stories, told well”, but it’s not Australian shows that people are furiously downloading legally and illegally. Local content requirements are a clumsy and inefficient means of making Australians watch stuff they’re mostly not interested in.

If governments are interested in undercutting the economies of scale and marginal cost benefits that overseas-produced television programs can tap into, then they should fund the production of local content directly and then let it compete with overseas content purely on audience interest alone.  If TV networks think there’s an Underbelly-style success there, they’ll show it.

Otherwise, local content requirements should be junked as a vestige of 20th-century protectionism.

But the government’s general disposition, it seems, is not to reduce the regulatory burden on the media sector but to punish those sectors that have successfully grown in recent years with additional obligations.  We already know that Stephen Conroy wants to extend the anti-siphoning scheme online, which in effect will add another legislative layer of censorship to his mandatory internet filter.

It’s only a few months since ABC TV head Kim Dalton called for the extension of local content rules to internet-based IPTV providers.  The FTA networks told the Productivity Commission last year that subscription television and online should be subject to the same regulations as they were.

Given FTA networks are gifted huge slabs of publicly owned spectrum, are protected from competition by an array of legislative measures and are given extensive taxpayer handouts, that argument is a nonsense but there are grave concerns in the subscription television sector that that is exactly what will happen.

The other thing to be concerned about in any review is who will represent the public interest.  The FTAs will have their lobbyists talking to the highest levels of Government.  News Ltd will be trying to be heard above the din of its anti-ALP editorial bias.  Fairfax will probably drag Bruce Wolpe back from the US to walk the halls of power.  The subscription sector will have its lobbyists engaged.  Local producers, their hands permanently stuck out demanding more cash, will be pushing their barrow.  If a Bill gets to the Senate, the process will get worse and we’ll get the minor parties pushing their own eccentric causes.

In short, everyone will be coming in for their chop, or paying people a lot of money to get in for their chop on their behalf.

But who will speak for media users — audiences, readers, subscribers?  Who will speak for the poor schmucks whose interests are never considered when politicians and moguls get together to work out media policy?  Ostensibly, the government is supposed to do that, but far more than virtually any other area of policy, media policy is all about politics, not the public interest.

No heavy-hitters, no former premiers or powerful lobbyists ever come to Canberra to speak up on behalf of ordinary Australians when it comes to media policy.  The Productivity Commission and the ACCC try to, but their voices are never listened to.

The only way for audiences to indicate their views has been to vote for their feet, and they’ve done exactly that in recent years, fleeing old media to online and subscription TV where they have greater control and choice than media moguls or politicians have ever wanted to give them.

Which may be why those sectors are the real targets of Conroy’s review.