The announcement came after officials at the EU met earlier this week to decide how audio and visual content on the Internet should be covered by EU broadcasting laws.
But while EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding said she had “no intention to regulate the Internet,” her comments at a broadcasting conference in Liverpool, England early Thursday left some broadcasters in doubt.
"Who in this room is in favor of child pornography on the new media?” she asked. “Who stands for the freedom to spread incitement to racial hatred on the new media?”
Reding added that child protection and hate speech rules should apply to Internet broadcasts, by default supporting the controversial plan to impose an EU-wide law over different mediums throughout Europe.
Many broadcasting companies, as well as Internet firms in Europe, are wary of such a law, convinced that any attempt to enforce content in the new “on-demand” world would be unrealistic at best and fascist at worst. Most of the concern voiced so far has argued unnecessary regulation would inhibit the market and create industry uncertainty throughout Europe’s online community.
"Our own research suggests that public expectations of BBC online content are very different from their expectation of what they see on BBC Television,” British Broadcasting Corporation director general Mark Thompson told reporters at a news conference Wednesday. “They simply do not feel they need, or want, the same level of protection."
Thompson added that the Internet should be allowed to regulate itself based on some form of popular consensus, not governmental regulation.
AOL Europe seems to concur with the idea of self-regulation. The company published a paper on the EU’s official website this week arguing common standards were already in place on the Internet.
"As AOL has demonstrated over a number of years, it is in our commercial interests to be a responsible self-regulating service provider," the paper said.
Several other major players in Europe’s online market agreed, including Yahoo! Europe. Representatives at Yahoo! posted a similar paper that proclaimed. the Internet was not “the Wild West,” and that all the major players in the online world already worked hand-in-hand with governments to track nefarious elements like child pornography.