I think we’ve hit the 5-year mark — 11th of March 2003 — the date OfcomWatch went live on the web (we moved it over to the blog platform a few months later). Luke and I were graduate students at the LSE — in a media regulation programme. OfcomWatch was an idea that was rejected as a fellowship project, but we went ahead with it on our own. Ofcom itself took shape during the same time period and commenced operations in December of that year. Here is what OfcomWatch looked like then:

So what have I learned after five years of watching Ofcom?

– UK media regulation and policy is almost exclusively a Labour affair. That will probably change soon, but since I have been watching it’s fair to say that the key people, the key themes, and the key policies are Labour-dominated.

– Ofcom have generally improved the quality of media and communications regulation in the UK. Nevertheless, I don’t recall Ofcom yet saying that it ever made any policy-related mistakes. Five years of error-free regulation? I doubt it.

– Regulatory convergence in the media and communications sector is being somewhat undermined by the BBC Trust, the Byron Review, the Convergence Think Tank, etc. Since Ofcom was created, we’ve seen a growing number of other public bodies in this sector, some with overlapping areas of interest with Ofcom.

– Merger of the five legacy regulators should produce joined-up thinking at Ofcom, but at times Ofcom have been wildly inconsistent: (i) advocating new subsidies in content (PSP, Channel 4) whilst opposing subsidy or regulatory relief in networks (NGA); (ii) allowing the dial-a-scam firm Opera Telecom to continue in business unhindered whilst unduly delaying Sky’s legitimate DTT proposal; and (iii) using leading-edge regulatory techniques in some cases whilst refusing to be fair and transparent in others.

– Only a few Ofcom decisions have big, real-world impact; the Digital Divided Review and the BT Settlement spring to mind. Much of Ofcom’s other work consists of mundane administration (numbering), absolutely pointless decision-making (broadcast complaints), or strategic thinking that is sometimes quit insightful or sometimes just really terrible (New News, Future Snooze).

– Despite the long-awaited arrival of the golden age of media abundance, old ways of doing things remain highly resistant to change. Martin Le Jeune just wrote a great piece in the FT on this issue. Link here.

– Finally, as a friend of mine recently observed, on a global scale there seems to be no correlation between the quality of the regulatory and policy environment and actual economic and social outcomes.

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Five more years? I doubt it!