Newsletter – March 2005

Vol. 6 No 3

Contents:

INCD News
Updates on UNESCO Convention Process

3. INCD to hold a seminar at the WTO

4. Update on the Senegal Meeting

5. The opening of national media markets through a GATS telecom deal

6. Events and Announcements

INCD News

Staffing updates

The INCD is delighted to announce that Albanela Pérez-Suárez has been appointed as the INCD Coordinator, commencing full-time work next Monday, 21 March. She has a background in academia and culture, and worked in the international affairs department of the Ministry of Culture in Venezuela before moving to Canada a few years ago. Albanela has also studied and worked in France. You are welcome to communicate with her in Spanish, French or English.

INCD has also hired a bookkeeper, Ms. Ethna Hartwick, whose first task will be to create an independent accounting system for INCD for implementation at the beginning of the new fiscal year, April 1.

We are pleased to welcome them and look forward to a successful year.

Further staffing announcements will be made in the upcoming weeks.

2. Updates on UNESCO Convention Process

INCD steps up campaign for an effective UNESCO Convention

By Garry Neil

INCD Executive Director

On 3 March, UNESCO’s Director General circulated to member states the latest draft of the proposed Convention on the protection of the diversity of cultural contents and artistic expressions. This draft reflects developments at the conclusion February’s Intergovernmental Committee meeting (see Vol. 6 No.2). In response, the INCD will prepare and distribute an up-dated version of the Convention which will select the most positive of the remaining options and create a comprehensive draft Convention. In it, the INCD will also urge several changes to the current wording to reflect the need for governments to assume positive obligations when they ratify the Convention and to ensure it has legal status that is equivalent to the trade agreements.

Prior to the next meeting, scheduled to begin 31 May, the Director General will circulate a “Chairman’s Text” being prepared next week. The Chairman and several other members of the Intergovernmental Committee’s Bureau have been directed by the Plenary to undertake additional work on the draft, to reduce the number of options on the table and to reflect the consensus expressed at the two meetings.

In April, INCD will circulate two documents to UNESCO delegations:

a revised Convention that will recommend several changes needed to ensure the Convention can achieve the basic objectives INCD has established;
a study prepared by an international trade lawyer which will analyze the language under consideration to regulate the relationship between the Convention and other international instruments.

The Convention will be available in English and French; at this time it is uncertain if INCD will have the capacity to translate the legal analysis. Following circulation of these documents, the INCD will encourage members around the world to meet with key officials in their own governments to advocate for the INCD proposals. If you are interested in participating in this campaign please contact the international secretariat.

As soon as the INCD documents are prepared, they will be posted on the website.

The INCD first endorsed the concept of a legally binding instrument on cultural diversity in Santorini, Greece in 2000. As reported in the last newsletter, while significant progress has been made since then and an effective Convention is within reach, there is a great deal of work to do. The INCD hopes that all members will familiarize themselves with the issues, endorse the INCD’s proposals and to work with their own governments to ensure a successful outcome at October’s UNESCO General Conference.

3. INCD to hold a seminar at the WTO

“Trade in Cultural Goods and Services: Assessing the compatibility between WTO trade rules and UNESCO's cultural diversity convention”

On 20 April, representatives of the INCD and collaborators will gather at the WTO headquarters in Geneva to discuss with government delegations the cultural implications of the current negotiations on the General Agreement on Trade in Services. The seminar will be part of the annual symposium at the WTO where civil society groups have an opportunity to discuss issues of international trade and the WTO and its work plan.

INCD Steering Committee member Jane Kelsey, a law professor at the University of Auckland, will review the GATS and outline how it can have significant direct and indirect consequences for culture and media policies. At the present time, there appears to be pressure on several WTO member states to make commitments for music services as part of the revised GATS offers to be tabled in May. As a result, the INCD will look at specific issues related to this critical cultural sector.

INCD Executive Director Garry Neil will review developments surrounding the proposed UNESCO Convention and will assess the compatibility between trade obligations and the provisions of the new Convention.

Other speakers for the event will be announced in the next week.

Following the seminar, the INCD delegation will meet with services trade officials from several countries to discuss these issues in more detail. Let us know if you think it would be useful to attempt to arrange a bilateral meeting with Geneva-based officials from your country. Please provide contact information where you can.

4. Update about the work on the Senegal Meeting

REVISED Dates for Senegal Meeting

Members of the INCD met with the INCP Liaison Group this month. One of the matters we discussed was the timing of the various meetings in Senegal and we must change slightly the dates of our meetings. The REVISED dates are:

Text Box: INCD Meeting – 17-20 November 2005. The Steering Committee will meet on the 17th, the Conference will be 18-20 November and the presentation to the INCP will be made on the 21st.

INCP Meeting – 20-22 November. The joint social activity will take place on the 20th, the contact group meets on that date and the Ministers meet 21-22 November.

INCD in Africa

The regional office for West and Central Africa of the International Network for Cultural Diversity (INCD) in Dakar, is opened and functional since March 9^th 2005. Some equipment is already installed and a Post Office mailbox opened (BP. 37161 Grand Yoff, Dakar). A letter asking for INCD Official Reconnaissance by the Government of Senegal was sent to the Minister of Culture.

The project for the important participation of African NGOs and Professional Cultural Associations in Civil Society’s meeting of November 2005 is finalized.

A meeting to create the Steering Committee for the organization of the November meeting will be held Thursday 24^th of March to replace the meeting of Tuesday of March 22, 2005 that was postponed. The Coordinator of INCD office in Dakar, the Senegalese Coalition for Cultural Diversity and the Senegalese Network of Socio-cultural Actors will participate in this meeting.

5. The opening of national media markets through a GATS telecom deal

Dissertation by Fred Wilson

Fred Wilson is the assistant to the President of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada. CEP is a large, multi-sectoral trade union which is Canada’s major trade union in a number of sectors, including forestry, energy, telecommunications and media.

One of our significant achievements over the past decade has been the formulation and adoption of comprehensive policies for each of these sectors. The two most recent policies are for telecommunications and media (this is the advertisement) which you may find useful.

I want to speak to you today about the viability of cultural diversity policies – which we might also just call, media democracy – in the context of trade negotiations and specifically, the GATS.

One framework for this discussion, of course, is the proposal for a new instrument, the convention on cultural diversity. However in the absence of a new instrument, the GATS loom large on our horizon. And if the negotiations in Paris fail to achieve a new instrument, the GATS will very probably have a major impact on media and cultural policies internationally. It is reported that half of all requests received in the European Union concern cultural services.

When activists consider the GATS negotiations, there is an understandable tendency to focus on the potential of GATS to affect public services, health care, education, water services and so on, particularly the provision of these services at the local level.

Media and culture are also on the list of items that may be affected by the GATS, but with significantly less focus or attention. There are many reasons for this, but a couple of the main reasons are:

First, the generally effective campaigns in many countries against the globalization of culture and the reluctance of many countries to agree to make significant offers on media or cultural issues. (Although few nations have agreed to put media and culture on the table, fewer still have agreed to a carve-out in principle.)

A second reason is that the audio visual global market is so dominated by the US, that there is less incentive for exporters of audio visual and other media products to press for a GATS deal in this area.

There are other factors, of course, and for all of these factors and those I have mentioned, there are also tendencies towards trade liberalization.

I want to draw your attention to another context for the fate of media and cultural industries at the GATS. Because this may be a case where it is more productive to ask not what might be negotiated, but rather to analyze what is actually being negotiated, and has been negotiated already.

This brings me to the subject of telecommunications. Telecommunications is the GATS success story. The 1997 Reference Paper on Telecommunications is both the forerunner and the standard for the GATS. It is the benchmark for introducing so-called “pro-competitive regulation” in a trade treaty, and it is what the GATS proponents want for every other sector. Before I go further, I must acknowledge that the Reference Paper is about basic telecommunication services and excludes cable, broadcast radio and television programming.

At least, it did exclude these sectors in 1997. Does it today? In my country, television services are now offered to new housing developments as a telecommunications service. There is currently a project between Bell Canada, our major telephone company, and Microsoft Networks to offer satellite TV on broadband networks. So the distinction between telecommunications and media is already an intriguing question with sweeping implications, as regards the GATS or any other treaty or domestic regulation.

Indeed, we are presently involved in an even more basic debate about defining a telephone. We used to think we knew what a telephone was, but with VOIP – voice over internet protocol – we are no longer sure. And the result may be that there soon won’t be any meaningful regulations for telephone services in any country. For some time we thought of the telephone company as a potential competitor to the television network. With VOIP, the tables are turned. Cable networks are poised to take away much of the telephone companies basic and long distance services.

But there is a more basic issue for Canadian media in the current round of the GATS, and I suspect for media industries in all countries. A great many countries have made both GATS requests and offers in the area of telecommunications.

In spite of the 1997 Reference Paper and the deregulation of that sector, the job is not complete. In Canada, for example, we retain a prohibition on foreign ownership of telecommunications services. We restrict foreign investors to 20% of direct investment, 33% ownership of parent companies, and a 46% total equity position in a telecom company. In addition, 80% of the Board of Directors of the company must be Canadian citizens.

Canada also prohibits foreign ownership of broadcasting enterprises by the same amounts. And a separate government policy prohibits the sale of a Canadian newspaper to a foreign owner.

It is these limits – that is, the telecom limits – which are now on the table in GATS negotiations. Both the European Union and Japan have requested that Canada eliminate these restrictions on equity investment. The American GATS requests have not been made public, but their position that media and cultural industries are no different than any other commodity are well known.

And while Canada has declared that culture is not negotiable at the GATS, it has proudly put telecommunications at the top of our list of offers. Herein is the contradiction in the Canadian position, or perhaps the lie. Canada perhaps is a useful case study for the international community because of the mix already attained in Canada of these 3 factors:

· Corporate concentration of telecommunications and media. Canada’s telecommunication market is essentially owned by two companies. Our media markets are very concentrated also. Four major companies dominate newspaper publishing, broadcasting and broadband media and internet.

· Cross ownership of telecommunications and media. Each of the four major media companies in Canada are publishers, broadcasters and internet or broadband providers. Our largest telephone company owns the largest national newspaper, and it owns a major private television network, and it owns the country’s largest internet provider. In Quebec, both concentration of ownership and cross ownership is particularly dramatic. One company effectively dominates publishing, broadcasting and internet.

· Beyond cross ownership, Canada also has a very high level of “convergence.” By convergence I mean a coming together of media platforms through digital technology. This is a critical factor because in the hands of integrated, corporate owners the same content is now published, broadcast and put on-line.

This technological capacity has undermined the classical distinction between carriers of content, and content providers. When the telephone company has a web site and home page, it has a need for content. It can now secure that content from a newspaper or television station that it also owns.

These realities also undermine the two most common regulatory answers to convergence. First, a so-called “firewall” is proposed to separate the newspaper publisher from determining content at the television station, or vice versa. This is meaningless protection when digital information is being produced for a corporate purpose across platforms.

The second protection discussed is divestment: the requiring of telecommunications companies to spin off or create new corporate structures for media. This would not only require the telephone company to sell or spin off its media holdings, but also would require the cable broadcaster to do the same to the television networks, sports programming etc. that it now uses to provide content for its cable network.

This is highly unlikely for at least two reasons. First, it would be the largest divestment in Canadian history involving the restructuring of many billions dollars in equity. For example, the value of Bell Globemedia – the media subsidiary of Bell Canada – is by itself estimated to be $4 billion. Second, divestment defies the business logic of digital production. Telecom companies and media companies have merged for the expressed purpose of selling digital content. In fact, the direct sales of digital music and movie products to consumers over telecom and cable systems is already significantly changing markets for these media products.

So, let me return to the point that rather than predicting what might happen to media and cultural industries in trade organizations, activists in Canada and other countries are well advised to assess not what might happen, but rather what is actually taking place.

Canada may well be a sign-post to the future for many other countries which have not yet achieved the levels of cross ownership and convergence that already exist in Canada.

The Canadian government has assured its media and cultural sector over and again that it will not make any offers in the GATS providing market access to these sectors. But this same government is aggressively pursuing GATS negotiations on telecommunications, and it a poorly kept confidentiality that Canada’s remaining foreign ownership restrictions in telecom will be negotiated away if there is a worthy GATS deal on services generally.

We have been asked to trust them that media and culture will not be sacrificed for the purpose of a GATS telecom deal. Unfortunately, we cannot put our trust in that assurance. To the contrary, it is time for cultural and media activists to be alerted to an imminent threat to cultural diversity. A fully deregulated, globalized and privatized telecommunications sector is a dangerous opening to the tearing down of the precarious protections that remain for national media and cultural markets.

More information on-line at www.cep.ca.