Broadcasting systems have finally come an important point.

■Broadcasting systems have finally come an important point.

Broadcasting has been treated as an isolated and special position, both in industry and in government, so it has fallen out of the economic value chain and is now in trouble.

The meetings of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications’ conference are treated as broadcasts in the diverse information space, including the Internet, and question the diversity, pluralism, and local properties of culture found there. This is the correct understanding.

In consideration of the deficit of local sites, what should be done about the number and scale of businesses?

Do domestic regulations aimed at eliminating the concentration of mass media from the era when Japan was thriving still mean something?

Things that I have always seen as problems are being discussed in public.

The NHK is also weighing the value of its existence against license fees.

A proposal to make its primary business simultaneous online distribution, as an entity responsible for basic information.

As talk of abolishing BBC license fees in the UK is coming up, it seems that the debate on NHK manner of existence will be taken seriously at last.

Joint ownership of infrastructure between the NHK and commercial broadcasters has also been proposed.

Amendments to the Broadcasting Act that permit NHK simultaneous distribution created an obligation of cooperation between the NHK and commercial broadcasters relating to online deployment, but the foundation for rolling out data business can be created using NHK license fees.

Copyright is also a topic of discussion. A discussion about facilitating rights processing by treating both IP multicast (broadcasting) and unicast (communications), which are handled separately, as broadcasting. The past decision to separate systems based on distribution technology was fundamentally flawed. It took us 20 years to realize.