On May 22, Luke and I sat down with Peter Luff MP, and talked to him about Ofcom and other regulatory and political issues facing the media and communications sector. We had seen Luff in action about a month earlier in his role as Chairman of the Trade & Industry Select Committee in its annual joint oversight session (with the Culture Media & Sport Committee) on Ofcom. Accordingly, we wanted to meet him and engage in more follow-up on these issues. Some nuggets:

On Ofcom’s initial actions in the Digital Dividend Review:

“Ofcom’s first decision is that spectrum should be allocated by a market-based mechanism because they cannot make the judgments between competing uses. Philosophically I agree with that. But you do get into some very difficult decisions quite quickly. Two principles emerge from this, in my view:

The first is the extent to which Ofcom are being asked to take political decisions rather than market decisions. The question of HDTV — is it something that people have a right to get free of charge? And the hard-pressed broadcasters (and they are hard-pressed in the commercial and the state sector) haven’t got extra money to spend on more spectrum. So, it’s a political decision — I think Ofcom got a political decision delegated to them. I think it’s been unreasonable.

The second issue is the quality of the technical information Ofcom brought to the debate. For the first time in my experience with Ofcom their technical information appeared to be severely deficient. So they were taking political decisions on the basis of bad technical information.”

On Ofcom’s focus on next generation access:

“I have a concern of a strategic nature of Ofcom’s role which may play a part in that. All the pressures on Ofcom deal with the consumer issues — the individual consumer issues that would attract headlines in the Daily Mail and The Sun rather than the issues that would attract headlines in the Financial Times. I think Ofcom are often distracted by these huge debates about childhood obesity or by the telecommunications market — international roaming charges. That’s not to say they are not important issues. They are. But the underlying concern I have is that — when we talk about the infrastructure of the UK, the telecommunications infrastructure is probably the most important one now. I would say it is more important than the roads.”

Click here for the full interview: Peter Luff Interview Transcript