Industry Seminar on Regulation in a Convergent Environment

In the light of technological and market convergence, the growing international trend is to merge the regulatory authorities for broadcasting and telecommunications sectors to form a unified regulatory body with the objective to formulating timely and well coordinated responses to regulatory issues arising from converging technologies and services. The Authority, together with the Office of the Telecommunications Authority, jointly organized a one-day seminar on "Regulation in a Convergent Environment" on Monday, 29 August 2005. The purposes of the seminar were to provide the local broadcasting and telecommunications industries an opportunity to meet representative of overseas unified regulators, to share the international experience and to explore means to cope with the challenges in Hong Kong.

The two keynote speakers of the Seminar were Mr Richard Hooper, Deputy Chairman and Chairman of Content Board of UK's Office of Communications, and Mr Chris Cheah, Acting Deputy Chairman of the Australian Communications and Media Authority. They spoke on their experiences as unified regulators in the UK and Australia respectively, and the approach to regulate content in a digital age. The speeches were supplemented by two panel discussions featuring leading representatives of the local broadcasting and telecommunications sectors. The seminar was very well received with 150 participants.