Stakeholder Consultation on Media Ownership and Transparency

SMIT (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) and Deloitte are carrying out a study on behalf of the European Commission on the transposition and implementation of the new provisions in the Audiovisual Media Services Directive.

Our questions are meant to help us understand your perspectives and views on the matter and to gauge whether, and to what extent, you deem regulation necessary. All information you provide will be aggregated and anonymised unless otherwise explicitly stated and agreed upon.

Please let us know in case you still need certain parts of your contribution to be treated confidentially.

Please contact Dr. Heritiana Ranaivoson (hranaivo@vub.be) concerning any questions on this survey.

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* 1. Please enter the below information

Name *

Postition and Organisation *

Country

Email Address

Phone Number

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* 2. In some EU Member States, national and/or regional legislation or regulation governs and limits ownership of any type of media (by restricting, for instance: the number of broadcasting licenses or newspapers that one natural or legal person can control; horizontal, vertical or diagonal cross-media ownership; foreign ownership of media companies; and/or categories of actors that can control media companies such as political parties or advertising agencies).

In your view, how effective is the implementation of such (cross-)media ownership rules?

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* 3. Please list up to 3 major issues of the last 5 years or mention important circumstances in your country that is relevant to the subject of (cross-)media ownership in any way and briefly describe them.

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* 4. In some EU Member States, mergers and acquisitions in the media sector are subject to sector-specific rules or procedures that are motivated by media pluralism concerns, for example:
- lower thresholds for the notification of (some) media mergers and acquisitions to ensure they receive extra scrutiny;
- an explicit mandate for the competition authority to take media pluralism considerations into account when assessing media mergers and acquisitions;
- a separate (consecutive or parallel) assessment of media mergers and acquisitions by the competition authority (on competition grounds) and by the media regulator (on media pluralism grounds);
- a system of ministerial over-ride (i.e. a minister can block or apply stricter conditions to media merger and acquisitions authorized under the general merger control rules).

In your view, how effective is the implementation of such media-specific merger control rules and procedures?

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* 5. Please list up to 3 major issues of the last 5 years or mention important circumstances in your country that is relevant to the subject of media-specific merger control in any way and briefly describe them.

The remaining questions also deal with media ownership, but specifically with respect to the transparency requirements laid out by governments and/or regulators to monitor this ownership. In other words, with the information media players have to release to governments and/or regulators, the transparency regime (made public, made available for consultation, etc) and how is this being enforced.

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* 6. In your view, how effective is the implementation of transparency requirements in your country(ies)/region(s)?

Do these transparency requirements capture relevant media owners sufficiently? Do they sufficiently provide regulators and the public an overview of who is behind the capital, connections to other companies related to those owners including in other parts of the ecosystem such as programmatic trading platforms, media agencies, third party data providers, etc.)?
What examples of best or worst practices with regard to ownership transparency rules do you know?
What are black holes in transparency obligations at this point? What domains need more transparency obligations?

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* 7. Please list up to 3 major issues of the last 3 years or mention important circumstances in your country that is relevant to the subject of ownership transparency in any way and briefly describe them.

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* 8. At EU level, to what extent, according to you, is enforcing transparency of media regulation, a task for the European Commission or better left up to individual member states/regions?

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* 9. In your opinion, to what extent should media/competition regulators share the collected ownership information with other regulators, especially when it comes to media players part of larger pan-European media conglomerates?

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* 10. Is there any other information or material not captured by our questions, but which you wish to share?

Please, send any files you want to share on the matter to hranaivo@vub.be with as subject “Media Ownership (Transparency) Survey”.

Please click Done at the end of this page to submit your answers. Thank you for your participation in this survey!