Cameron is in to podcasting in a big way (did you know the sky is blue?), and he pointed to this article in the Australian (via his lunatic friend) in which the commercial radio lobbyists are seeking a degree of protection from emerging digital competition, although I don’t think this really applies to podcasting (but you never know what a stretched interpretation of the law might do to ya).
I read it with an overall context of natural selection and found this quote quite interesting:
"We have invested hundreds of millions of dollars setting up commercial radio in this country, and we are looking for government to give us a chance to move radio into future," Ms Warner said.
I had a bit of a chuckle actually because I sat there thinking of that hundreds of millions of dollars being spent and along comes this simple technology which probably hasn’t had more than a million spent on it in the twelve months its been around (that includes all the bandwidth costs for everyone, on the entire planet) and it has the potential to blow these established networks away.
To me – that infrastructure looks to expensive to even consider protecting. I’m not anti-protectionism but I think you need to defend the good ideas – not the outdated ones. Of course, given the government gets fees from spectrum licensing I can see them doing something stupid.