Yesterday the Government Convergence Review panel issued a “framing paper” to get discussions under way about the regulatory issues created by convergence.

Business Spectator’s Stephen Bartholomeusz, a serial NBN critic, was quick out of the blocks and used the paper to suggest that it reflected the ominous possibility of Labor using the NBN to impose greater control over online content.

Sadly, the idea that privately controlled networks aren’t just as easily used by governments interested in spying on their citizens or controlling what they see online doesn’t stand up. Reconstituted US telco monolith AT&T was happy to help the Bush Administration spy on what Americans were seeing and doing online.  Middle East regimes used, and doubtless still use, tools from a range of Western private sector IT companies to do the same, and to censor internet usage. Indeed, there’s a whole cyber military-industrial complex fed by the vast funding of the national security state mentality of western governments in the last decade. Nor let us forget the enthusiasm with which Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Amazon implemented the Obama Administration’s anger at WikiLeaks by trying to strangle it online.

Bartholomeusz’s conviction that only governments will “restrict and regulate access to content” is almost touchingly naïve. Still, his point about the impulse to regulate online is an important one — indeed, the most important one raised by the government’s convergence review.

Anyone with long-term exposure to media and communications policy in Australia will read Timothy Wu’s The Master Switch with a striking, in fact at times almost nauseating, sense of familiarity. Wu covers the sweep of US communications policy since the late 19th century to show that, inevitably, the most powerful, least innovative and most anti-competitive communications companies work hard, and work closely with government, to stifle threats from new technology, delaying their implementation, and trying to destroy any nascent threats to their business model, no matter how beneficial for consumers, and no matter what tactics they have to employ.

Many of those tactics are familiar to Australians who watched the free-to-air TV broadcasters prevent subscription TV from being licensed in Australia for years, and then had it crippled by regulation when it was allowed in by the Keating government. The same approach was successfully employed by the FTAs when it came to digital television.

The rationale employed by the broadcasters in 2000 was the same offered by AT&T an ocean away and half a century ago as it successfully fought attempts not merely to compete with it, but to even use its service for other complementary services: anything that threatened the position of the incumbent or could conceivably threaten the position of the incumbent threatened the quality of service provided by the incumbent. Indeed Wu’s book is in part a primer on the taxonomy of gatekeeper rhetoric used to convince regulators of the need to stifle innovation and competition from new entrants.

The cycle is continuing here and overseas, and the effort to stifle the threat posed by online communication to the business models of the the traditional media incumbents proceeds apace. Bartholomeusz is correct to warn that this is a key danger of the convergence review.

One of the favourite tactics that the big media companies — and remember, our national media is controlled by only six companies, four of them families and most of them working in concert in various combinations — will continue to use is to argue that the same consumer “protections” that are in place for traditional media be imposed on new media. Let’s call this the “we know what’s best for consumers” argument. It’s a classic gatekeeper ploy — establish high regulatory barriers to entry under the guise of protecting consumers.

The FTAs have been running a variant of the argument to head off government plans to reallocate spectrum currently used for broadcasting after analog switch off, claiming they should be allowed to retain it to offer services such as 3D — just like they were allowed large chunks of spectrum to run HD digital services and, conveniently, keep competitors out.

The Convergence Review Background paper explicitly raises the issue of extending old media regulations to online:

Under the current regulatory framework, Australian content quotas (including children’s content) and local content quotas apply to commercial television and radio. These broadcast quotas ensure the production and broadcast of Australian content and complement other government initiatives that support the supply of Australian content. Subscription television services are subject to a different scheme that requires them to spend 10 per cent of their drama expenditure on Australian content. Services delivered over the internet or mobile networks have no content requirements at all.

The rise of these alternative audiovisual services and the growing fragmentation of the media market raises questions as to the best way to ensure the ongoing production and distribution of local and Australian content that reflects and contributes to the development of national and cultural identity.

The threat is clear — to somehow hobble online services with content restrictions, just as subscription TV was hobbled. Yesterday’s Framing paper establishes the goal of ensuring “the policy framework should apply consistently to like services regardless of the platform or technology used to deliver the service.” And the threat is quite real: the government has already embraced the “we know what’s best” argument in a key area: Stephen Conroy’s anti-siphoning reforms late last year extended this anti-competitive rort to online.

Wu demonstrates that the drive for the stifling of innovation and competition in communications and media comes from the private sector, but needs a complicit or at least wilfully negligent government to be fully successful. Australian media policy has repeatedly demonstrate that applies here as well. The biggest threat in the regulatory consequences of this convergence review comes not via the NBN but from our big media companies and a government willing to play the traditional role of hand maiden to their desire to destroy competition.