But this glitzy lure disguises the problems of the Howard Government's
decision to give an additional channel to each of the free-to-air (FTA)
television networks to help their move into digital TV broadcasting. The bonus issue this week of air space strikes at the heart of competition in the media and retards the progress of online media industries as the information epoch evolves.

The FTAs have been given an oligopoly over the delivery of digital
televised information. The Howard Government also grants them the right to transmit data services such as the Internet for an undecided fee in direct competition with existing newspaper publishers without reciprocating and allowing newspapers into TV.

The Nine, Seven and Ten networks have, in effect, received many hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars of value which rightly should have gone to the public purse from an auction of the vacant air space. The FTAs receive an unfair boost through the decision to protect them from competition.

Under the new digital regulatory regime, new TV competitors will be banned until at least 2008. The Howard Government's decision to freeze cross-media ownership laws until 2008 locks out newspapers from breaking into the game of  the protected FTAs. It is an unconscionable act of discrimination against viable competitors with legitimate aspirations to enter into the new media.

Likewise, workable controls preventing the FTAs from taking over the
emergent online industry and re-constructing it in the image of network
television, are absent.

This is an anti-competitive free kick for the FTAs and nobbles aspiring
entrants into the television or online industries. Internet service providers, telecommunications companies, newspapers or innovative new start-up companies' web presences will not be able to exploit the ubiquitous household TV set in the same way as the FTA broadcasters will. Why?

The digital largesse improves the TV networks' ability to pitch for new
interactive audiences and customers to the exclusion of other legitimate interests. This is because the new digital TV set will allow viewers to watch simultaneously - or flit between - (for example) the high-definition pictures of a movie or sports event, its accompanying web site loaded with statistics, stars, player profiles, merchandising and interactive links to things such as home banking, travel agencies and a wealth of other services - all offered by TV network-affiliated business enterprises.

A network's hotlinks to other services will have significantly more traffic than other interactive service providers struggling to be noticed among the sea of competitors' sites on the Internet.

Already the networks are well positioned to use this alluring bundle of
entertainment and services. The Nine Network is in bed with mogul Bill Gates through the Ninemsn partnership. Seven Online was formed this week by the Seven Network and global computer chip giant Intel Corporation to forge its TV-Internet business.

Newspapers, which deal with issues in significantly more detail than the
trivialising electronic media, will suffer in their traditional market while
being blocked from effectively entering new electronic ones. These are not moves of a truly free enterprise government.

They amount to an ambush and a grave threat to our media future.