Another week down the drain: 

 *  First, a very special note from your friends at OfcomWatch:  It’s been four years since we started this little website.  Wanna see what it was like at the very beginning courtesy of the internet archive?  Click here.  Actually, we really started the idea of OfcomWatch in December 2002, but the website did not become a blog until the following spring.  [cue:  The Way We Were, Barbara Streisand]  Needless to say the wild dreams we had when starting the site have not come true — I thought I would have secured a KBE by now — but we’ve had a lot of fun along the way. 

*  Is it just me, or has Ofcom been getting too much bad press lately?  At the very start of the week The Sunday Telegraph laid into Ofcom over the HFSS / junk food adverts ban cheese issue with the title ‘Brainy Ofcom is at it again‘.  Reminds me of Woody Allen in Small Time Crooks saying ‘but everybody in prison called me the brain‘ and his partner-in-crime replying ‘but they were being ironic!’  On a serious note, for those of you regulation watchers that are wondering about the theory behind these types of regulations, check out: Colin S. Diver, The Optimal Precision of Administrative Rules, 93 Yale LJ 65 (1983).  Diver writes in part:

‘A rational rulemaker will therefore be attentive to the probable effect of his choice of words upon the rule’s intended audience. First, he will want to use words with well-defined and universally accepted meanings within the relevant community. I refer to this quality as “transparency.”  Second, the rulemaker will want his rule to be “accessible” to its intended audience — that is, applicable to concrete situations without excessive difficulty or effort.  Finally, of course, a policymaker will care about whether the substantive content of the message communicated in his words produces the desired behavior.  The rule should, in other words, be “congruent” with the underlying policy objective.’

The precision problem in regulation is why many regulators have waiver schemes, allowing regulated firms to submit a situation where the application of the rules should be waived because the underlying purpose of the policy in question will not be served.  Certainly, if I was a food manufacturer unfairly caught by this ban, I would formally seek a waiver of the rule.

*  I was just told that Hungary has tentatively selected 31 December 2011 for its digital switchover date.  Digital Danube…