Senator ALSTON (Communications, the Information Economy and the Arts) (11:27 AM) —For example, Cisco's model is simply a proprietary alternative to Web TV, which is the Microsoft brand name. These are simply examples of the Internet being translated to a television sized screen. There will be, no doubt, further progress in terms of technological developments, and they will all be considered when convergence is part of the review process. So a lot of these things will come under the microscope in due course but, at the present time, if we take what we generally think is the starting point for the concept of datacasting, those players are already datacasting. It is just that it is not particularly relevant in terms of legislation. No-one is proposing to stop them from doing that. We generally think that it is good because it is expanding the boundaries.

The reason we are having a review in this area is that we want to distinguish between broadcasters pursuing their traditional trade of broadcasting and moving across to another area which not only would be the subject of taxation, because the existing free to air players and the new entrants would have to pay equal revenue, but also to ensure that the boundary line did not enable the new entrants to be de facto broadcasters. That is why it is relevant only in the current context, but that does not in any way mean that we are constraining the use of other technologies for datacasting purposes. In practice, it is already happening. There is a proliferation of web sites, there are innumerable service providers—over 600 in this country—and they are all facilitating what you could loosely describe as datacasting by other means.