If you missed the news cycle, here’s a quick recap.

When the latest episode of The Karl Stefanovic Show appeared last Tuesday it featured the infamous Robinson “interview” (actually an extended monologue interspersed with softball questions and approving chuckles from Stefanovic). It immediately drew widespread criticism for its derogation of journalistic responsibility.

A day later, the episode was taken offline — apparently by Stefanovic’s team — and republished by Pauline Hanson on her YouTube channel, where it has since been viewed more than 500,000 times.

By the end of the week, Nine had declared it was parting ways with Stefanovic, prompting its former star to release an unapologetic YouTube video declaring himself “free” and “truly independent” from mainstream media.

These highly publicised events generated commentary in all corners of the Australian media. Much of the discussion has focused on the terms of Stefanovic’s exit from Nine, the viability of his podcast venture, and the strategy behind the Robinson interview. (Was it a misstep on Stefanovic’s part or a deliberate move to stoke controversy and hasten his exit from Nine?)

These are important issues, but for those interested in media and politics they aren’t the only questions worth considering.

Why is it that one of Australia’s most highly paid media personalities would abandon national breakfast television — a platform that attracts a wide audience and helps to set the daily political agenda — for a highly uncertain future as a fringe podcaster catering to conspiracy theorists and neo-fascists? And what does all this tell us about the status of television within a rapidly changing global media ecosystem?

Stefanovic’s podcasting experiment may seem a counter-intuitive move for a figure who clearly relishes national celebrity. But performers like Stefanovic are not in the habit of choosing smaller audiences, less prestige and less income. They make strategic decisions based on where they think media markets and audiences are going.

Stefanovic is gambling that a prominent position within the global far-right mediasphere may be more impactful — and potentially more lucrative — than his current position at the apex of an established but fast-declining mass medium.

This is not an unreasonable assumption. Commercial television audiences and advertising revenues have been in freefall for years. While shows like Today still attract hundreds of thousands of viewers daily, those audiences are old (the average age of linear free-to-air viewers is fifty) and steadily decreasing in number. There are simply not enough young viewers tuning in to replace them.

As Stefanovic knows, the power and prestige of commercial broadcast television is in terminal decline — along with the advertising revenues that sustain that sector. Twenty years ago, when Stefanovic took the reins at Today, television was an industry of long lunches and lavish compensation packages, with the biggest stars endlessly indulged by management. No longer. Television is now a business of shrinking markets; aggressive cost reduction is the only route to profitability.

These dire economics may explain why Nine moved swiftly to sack Stefanovic. Scrubbing his $2-million-plus annual pay package off the budget sheet while simultaneously reassuring risk-averse advertisers that broadcast television remains a safe space for their brands was clearly the smart choice — and perhaps Nine’s only viable option.

One of the most interesting commentaries about the Stefanovic affair came from a Nine stablemate, the business columnist Elizabeth Knight. In her column for the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, Knight took a stab at interpreting the business logic behind Stefanovic’s lurch to the right.

Stefanovic “astutely picked the direction of media monetisation – the fragmentation of audiences and the rise of the podcast,” she wrote, noting that the most popular podcasts are those populist titles that “push… back on the status quo and [promote] the politics of grievance.”

For Knight, though, Stefanovic’s move represents a misunderstanding of the Australian media market. “In larger markets such as the UK or the US, there is a good living to be made by the likes of Joe Rogan,” she wrote, “but the same can’t necessarily be said for a market the size of Australia.”

Has Stefanovic fundamentally misunderstood the economics of national media? Is Australia not big enough to sustain the kind of fringe media that he is trying to cultivate? This may well be the case. But perhaps Stefanovic and his team have their eyes set on a different prize: a shot at stardom within the global far-right media sphere, which extends well beyond our national borders.

You can see, then, why Stefanovic may be willing to trade a declining national television audience for a dispersed, transnational and highly engaged audience of far-right YouTubers.

One thing is clear: old assumptions about mass and niche media are being tested by these strange events. When Australia’s best-known commercial TV news personality can suddenly reinvent himself as a far-right media celebrity and then try to take a chunk of the national audience with him on a journey into the fringes of the manosphere, something important has shifted in Australian media.

The distance between television — a nationally regulated, “old” broadcast medium — and the echo chambers of social media now seems smaller than ever.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by this. After all, the commercial free-to-air networks have long stoked the fires of anti-immigrant sentiment with their racialised coverage of crime, boat arrivals and housing affordability. Stefanovic’s politics may represent only an intensification of, rather than a radical departure from, this ignoble tradition. •

The post Exit, far right appeared first on Inside Story.

Her predecessor, Michelle Rowland, declared ominously in October that broadcast TV was “entering a period of unmanaged transition.” Rowland “believe[d] in the broadcasting platform,” but a sustainable future would require “changes to the way… broadcasters operate and the way they reach their audiences.” Despite deep cost-cutting, the shift of viewers from linear to on-demand content services and the decline in advertising revenues were “putting some broadcasters in a position where they can’t keep the doors open, for certain services.”

A few months earlier, the company delivering Network 10’s channels to Mildura had announced it was turning off the transmitter and handing back its licence. Viewers who wanted those channels could watch the Sydney versions via the 10 Play app or website. The Seven, Nine, ABC and SBS over-the-air signals would still be available in the area. This was what an “unmanaged pathway” would look like. Staying on it, said Rowland, would lead to “more service closures in remote and regional markets, where the financial pressures are greatest.” This trend “may eventually manifest in the larger cities.”

The financial pressures noted by Rowland became visible again in June when Seven briefly disappeared from the airwaves of southeast South Australia during a dispute between the network and its regional licensee — further evidence of the precarity of regional television in a shrinking ad market.

Britain is further down the same path. Ofcom, which regulates TV, radio, online and postal services and allocates radiofrequency spectrum, says the system of “public service media” in Britain is “under serious threat.” By public service media, it means not just the publicly funded TV and radio broadcaster, the BBC, with its 2025–26 revenue of nearly £4.5 billion (more than A$9 billion) but all the other free-to-air broadcasters as well: ITV and STV in Scotland, Channel 4 and the Welsh language S4C, and Channel 5, which is owned, like Australia’s Ten, by Paramount Global.

Young British children spend more time watching YouTube than broadcast TV and less than half of sixteen- to twenty-four- year-olds watch any broadcast TV at all in an average week. “[I]n a world dominated by global streaming platforms, public service media risks becoming an endangered species, and time is running out to intervene to protect it,” says Ofcom’s director of broadcasting and media. This matters because public service media is “stitched into the cultural fabric of UK society. It starts conversations, educates and informs, and brings us together in moments of national importance.” It also “supports the UK’s production sector — a global leader which contributes meaningfully to the creative economy and attracts significant investment into the UK.”

Ofcom has proposed a “six-point plan” that includes remarkable steps to save an industry that dominated the media scene a little over two decades ago. Public service broadcasters “should work urgently with YouTube” to ensure their content is “prominent and easy to find on the platforms, and on fair commercial terms.” If YouTube doesn’t cooperate then the British government “should consider” new laws to compel the platform to increase visibility of public-service television content.

By early next year, meanwhile, “urgent clarity” is needed from the government about the future of the digital terrestrial TV transmission network: leave decisions any later and “the investment and innovation needed to put universal TV distribution on a sustainable footing [for] all audiences” is at risk. Decisions are also required about extra government money for specific program genres: Ofcom recommends priority to “socially valuable but commercially less viable genres, such as news, local news and children’s content.” These trusted, original programs “reflect British culture and bring the country together.”

These recent statements add to Ofcom’s high-profile interventions in television policy. Last year the agency released a major report that forecast several scenarios for British television, including the switch-off of broadcast television “over the 2030s” or its evolution into a slimmed-down “nightlight” service carrying only a few essential channels. Ofcom was signalling here that the economic model of broadcast television was unsustainable. Policy change was urgently required.

Ofcom’s argument about the pressing need for a “managed transition” in television preceded Minister Rowland’s more cautious statements by several months. But it is clear both countries face the same challenge: the steady, structural decline of the broadcast television model.

Broadcast television has been an “endangered species” for a long time. The dangers have come from different sources. In the mid-1990s, Australians finally got the multichannel pay TV services available years earlier in overseas markets. These provided new buyers for programs and new spots for TV advertising while accelerating the fragmentation of viewing that started when video-cassette recorders and games consoles were first connected to TV screens. Telcos Telstra and Optus entered the TV business, rushing out new cable networks and investing heavily in sports and other programming. Foxtel became a bigger business than any of the free-to-air operators, although it never attracted more than a third of Australian households, and its owners remained big but familiar locals until British-based streamer DAZN acquired it earlier this year.

The early internet promised what some envisaged as a “Celestial Jukebox.” Everything would be available to everyone, everywhere. Movies, TV programs, short films, music, books, whatever. If content had been created, it would be stored and discoverable, viewable, readable, listenable. A lot of content did become available online, but much, much more was created afresh, especially for the video-sharing site called YouTube, launched in 2004 and acquired the following year by search giant Google. The genres were both familiar and novel. Audiences watched, listened and uploaded, sometimes adding to the time they spent with broadcast media and sometimes substituting for it. Advertisers flocked to the site and to other social media platforms hosting video.

Streamers, too, attracted eyeballs and revenue. The US giant Netflix launched in Australia and New Zealand in 2015 and others followed. These were more like on-demand television services, initially offering drama, documentary, children’s shows and other well-established genres. Over time, they became even more like TV, commissioning exclusive titles, introducing advertising, acquiring rights to live sporting events, moving into genres like real crime, entertainment and reality. Ampere Analysis’s Guy Bisson, speaking at a Future of TV Advertising event in Sydney in April, called this the “broadcastification” of streaming.

The other potent new form of competition for TV broadcasters comes from the very tools that display their services: smart TVs. No longer dumb devices that simply translate digital code embedded in electrical signals into pictures and sounds, TV sets have become platforms. This enables consumer electronics manufacturers to earn revenue through ads carried on the home screen and on their own streaming channels: Samsung TV Plus now offers around 150 channels in Australia. Revenue also comes from content sales, rentals, and commissions, and from prominence fees for third-party apps. Manufacturers gather and control data about what is being watched on their screens that helps them to target their advertisements and services.

For TV broadcasters, smart TVs are a mixed blessing. They have generally loved the trend towards bigger screens, because this has helped to refocus fragmented household attention on a premium screening environment, perfect for live, “event” television. But these mighty, wall-mounted screens have ushered Samsung, LG, Hisense, TCL and Sony into the broadcasters’ revenue and customer relationships as well.

The Coalition’s most recent communications minister, Paul Fletcher, published a green paper nearly five years ago containing proposals to “modernise television regulation in Australia.” Attempting to tackle the problem of the long-term sustainability of the free-to-air industry in a world where online streaming of TV was surging, the paper proposed a kind of reverse incentive. If enough TV broadcasters were interested in squeezing their transmissions down to a smaller number of channels, thereby using less radiofrequency spectrum, the federal government might be willing to lighten their tax burden and hand them some of the proceeds from auctioning the vacated frequencies. It was complicated, the impacts were uncertain, and the proposals were not well received by broadcasters. Nothing came of the plan.

Under Labor’s Michelle Rowland change occurred in several areas. The most significant legislative initiative was a “prominence framework” that will commence in 2026. It is intended to ensure Australian audiences can easily find and access local free-to-air TV services and apps — ABC iView, SBS On Demand, 10 Play, 9Now, 7Plus — on the home screens of imported smart TVs that would otherwise prioritise the services of overseas media and technology giants. The commercial networks welcomed the outcome, as did the ABC and SBS, which regard prominence as an essential protection for public-service broadcasting. Further changes to legislation last year were designed to enable WIN and other broadcasters to seek operational efficiencies by consolidating services onto a single transmitter.

Licences for community TV services in Adelaide and Melbourne were extended beyond their 30 June 2024 expiry date, enabling those services to stay on air until another use is identified for their frequencies. An audit of TV infrastructure in remote and regional areas was undertaken and funding and administrative arrangements were extended for seven years so that the viewer access satellite television service, or VAST, continues to provide commercial and national free-to-air services to the estimated 1.5 million viewers in remote and poorly served locations who rely on it.

Rowland’s big commitment in October 2024, though, was not delivered before the election. A discussion paper was to be released for consultation in early 2025, “explor[ing] pathways for the future of television, shaped by the possibility of realising a digital dividend.” A digital dividend is what was reaped after broadcasters shifted from analogue to digital transmission between 2001 and 2013. The new technology enabled more efficient use of spectrum and a large band of frequencies was reallocated and auctioned mainly to support better mobile broadband. TV viewers got more TV; mobile users got faster broadband speeds and larger data caps; the Treasury got a lot of money.

The minister was crystal clear. She was “not [her emphasis] announcing that the Government has identified, or decided to yield, a digital dividend.” But she was “putting, front and centre, the important question of what the future of television may be.” It was “an essential platform in Australia, and we need a mature and measured discussion to plan its future.”

The technologies available to support a second digital dividend — such as higher-resolution DVB-T2 broadcasting — are not as revolutionary as those deployed for the first, and the TV industry that will need to pay for them is not as rich. Some efficiencies are possible but everything will come at a cost — to broadcasters, to viewers, and perhaps even to the government. There will not be more broadcast TV: there may even be a bit less in some places. Well down the track, there will probably be further improvements to mobile and other wireless services but alternative spectrum users are unlikely to pay as much for vacated spectrum as they did more than a decade ago.

This second Albanese administration has already seen a little more of what “unmanaged transition” looks like. The AFL decided no free-to-air footy would be shown on Saturdays this season in Victoria, Tasmania and the Northern Territory, although it has scheduled more of the Thursday night games that are shown live on 7. Only Amazon subscribers got to watch the biennial summit of men’s cricket, the World Test Championship final in June, where Australia played South Africa at Lord’s. Then, as noted earlier, some South Australian country viewers temporarily lost access to Seven’s channels, including Thursday and Friday night AFL, while the local broadcaster and Seven brawled over commercial arrangements.

Overseas, the French public service broadcaster France Television has done a deal with Amazon Prime to carry its free-to-air channels and its commercial rival TF1 has made a similar arrangement with Netflix. This follows the closure in 2022 of Salto, a streamer designed as a common platform for French broadcasters. The new deals represent a radically different kind of future for public service media, with a handful of channels embedded within a vast universe of content branded and supplied from elsewhere.

None of these threats to what is now free-to-air are directly the fault of governments, but electors in Australia and elsewhere are likely to ask what is being done about them. Ofcom’s call to arms is a further sign that the stakes for TV broadcasters everywhere, and especially for the distinctive programs they offer, are getting very high indeed.

Michele Rowland and Paul Fletcher both spent a lot of time in and around media before being allocated the communications portfolio, Rowland as a commercial lawyer acting for broadcasters and telcos, Fletcher as a senior executive with Optus. The media marketplace in Australia and overseas is serving up a crash course to their successor. •

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The controversy, the latest in a string of flare-ups related to digital advertising, has been triggered by concerns about “brand safety,” the protection of a company’s image among consumers. On 9 March, Britain’s Times newspaper reported that video advertisements from major corporations including Mercedes-Benz and Nissan were showing up on pro–Islamic State and pro-Nazi YouTube channels, unbeknown to the brands themselves.  

By the following week, the French ad agency Havas and a string of major brands had pulled all their advertising from YouTube, lest they and their clients end up in the headlines as well. In Australia, Holden and Kia followed suit after being linked to a misogynistic men’s rights video.

Spokespeople for the affected brands – which also include PepsiCo, Volkswagen, Verizon, AT&T, Toyota, Johnson & Johnson and Sainsbury’s – invariably stress that the culprit is the retargeting systems used in internet advertising, which follow individual users as they move around the web.

“We are deeply concerned that our ads may have appeared alongside YouTube content promoting terrorism and hate,” AT&T stated in a press release. “Until [YouTube’s parent company] Google can ensure this won’t happen again, we are removing our ads from Google’s non-search platforms.”

How do we explain these apparent glitches? And what do they mean for the internet more broadly?

The programmatic problem

It’s not only these brands whose ads are appearing next to offensive content. Nor is it restricted to YouTube. In the United States, a parallel controversy about ads on Breitbart has prompted more than a thousand companies to boycott the alt-right news site, many claiming they had no idea their ads were being placed there to begin with.

At its core, the controversy reflects a structural problem in digital advertising markets. Long bubbling away in the background, tensions over this issue are now becoming very public as media companies, regulators and advertisers begin airing their grievances at the same time. To understand the problem, we need to know a little about how digital advertising markets work.

Digital advertising is a massive business. Digital ad expenditure is this year expected to outstrip television advertising for the first time. Most of the money will go straight to Google and Facebook for search and social ads. But a substantial amount will reach the ad exchanges (including Google’s DoubleClick) behind the “programmatic buying” model of online display advertising.

In some senses, programmatic buying has more in common with advanced sharemarket trading than conventional media business. In a programmatic transaction, ad agencies don’t deal directly with websites (known as “publishers” in industry parlance). Instead, they contract with ad exchanges, which purchase ads in real time, at scale, across multiple publishers. Whenever we visit a website using programmatic advertising, a complex series of transactions takes place behind the scenes to determine which ads get shown to us.

Everything in this system is based on a website visitor’s personal profile, as determined by the cookies in their browser. Advertisers are not buying space so much as access to a particular kind of consumer (for example, a seventeen-year-old male interested in sneakers). In this way, advertisers can effectively follow individuals across many different platforms. This explains why ads for goods we have previously researched online (or even eBay items we have looked at) often show up days later on unrelated websites.

The other distinctive feature of programmatic buying is that it uses a byzantine system of real-time auctions, with buyers effectively bidding among each other for particular ad placements. This is all supposed to happen in the 250 milliseconds before a webpage loads. Over time, the bidding system has grown to include a long and opaque chain of intermediaries, including supply-side platforms and demand-side platforms. This opaque supply chain makes it difficult to know exactly where ads are going and who is seeing them – and it also slows down page-load times for users.

The blowback

Recent months have seen a string of industry scandals related to programmatic buying – and they don’t just relate to unfortunate ad placements. Brands, publishers, consumer advocates and regulators are all starting to speak out about a series of problems in the system.

One of the issues is revenue leakage. Publishers increasingly complain that they are being ripped off by ad-tech vendors. For example, the Guardian (which sells the majority of its display ads programmatically) receives only 30 per cent of the revenue generated by these sales, with the rest going to ad-tech intermediaries. This week, it announced it is suing its former programmatic partner, Rubicon Project, over just that issue. It has also pulled its ads from YouTube because of brand safety concerns.

In addition to revenue leakage concerns, there are also longstanding questions about deceptive publisher behaviour, traffic broker fraud and ad network fraud. Bot fraud is another massive issue, with industry research suggesting that up to 37 per cent of traffic on some websites is fraudulent.

“Ad-tech companies have made billions of dollars a year from fraudulent traffic,” says Shailin Dhar, an ad fraudster turned ad-tech guru quoted in the Financial Times. “Fraud is built into the foundation of advertising supply.” Add to this massive consumer use of ad blockers, and we have the ingredients for an industry crisis.

Google is in a unique position here. As the owner of YouTube, it controls one of the major venues for programmatic ad spending. It also owns the largest digital ad exchange, DoubleClick. So it has a lot at stake in the present system of programmatic advertising, which it helped to create.

But YouTube, as an open video platform, makes Google vulnerable. As we all know, YouTube is a massive ocean of potentially objectionable content. It contains the best and the worst of the internet, and of human nature. Google’s complex filtering systems are still poorly equipped to distinguish between “safe” and “unsafe” content (and they frequently overreach when trying to do so). Even though the company is frantically tweaking its algorithms to satisfy nervous advertisers, brand safety will always be an issue.

For the purposes of research, I visited a number of alt-right and hate-speech YouTube channels this week to see what ads were being placed against them. Within minutes, I had viewed ads from major brands including a Hollywood movie studio and a car manufacturer. Hitting “reload” repeatedly brings up more well-known brands, none of which would be happy to be associated with this kind of content, but all of which would find it hard to avoid if they wish to access the kind of audience that (from an ad-tech perspective) becomes algorithmically associated with such content.

Put simply, there is no way that the programmatic model can ensure brands will not, from time to time, end up next to unpleasant content. The rise of advertising automation and social media paradoxically means the end of control for brands.

Kicking the hornet’s nest

The YouTube problem is probably not going to peter out any time soon, partly because it is so easy to expose these brands to embarrassment. All it takes is a dodgy YouTube channel, a few clicks, and voilà – a news story.

Indeed, the prospect of getting one over on Google may explain the unbridled enthusiasm with which many news outlets – notably the Times, the Financial Times, the Guardian and the Fairfax papers – have been reporting the story.

They are motivated by a mix of public interest and self-interest. Anything that can be done to discredit the programmatic advertising model and its Silicon Valley champions may work in their favour. In this sense, the brand safety controversy could be good news for old media. More direct relationships between ad buyers and publishers might mean cutting out some of the ad-tech intermediaries.

It could also push advertisers (especially prestige brands, for whom context is critical) towards purchasing less risky kinds of advertising – such as print and television advertising – rather than competing for low-value eyeballs in the jungle of Facebook and YouTube. Another option is branded content (aka product placement) in TV shows and movies, and via social media “influencers.” If ad dollars were to move around in this way, the impact on both publishers and platforms could be significant.

This gives us a sense of the larger implications of the problem. Brand safety in programmatic advertising is about more than the reputation of Volkswagen or Bunnings. It is also, at a more structural level, about the economic models that underpin online media in general.

The future of news media depends on the transaction models that get used by ad agencies and exchanges, because they ultimately fund the journalism that these institutions produce. Similarly, the governance of social media platforms (how they regulate sensitive content, for example) may also change as a result of what happens in the digital advertising ecology.

So, there is a lot at stake in these debates. Even if you hate advertising, like most of us do, you might want to tune in for this one. •

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Among the proposed initiatives is a European content quota for Netflix and other streaming services. Recognising that American tech firms will control a growing share of EU eyeballs in coming years – and noting the comparative advantage their “over-the-top” services have in relation to heavily regulated European broadcasters, which must comply with a raft of content and classification rules – the EC now proposes that the streaming giants “reserve at least 20 per cent share for European works in their catalogues.”

What’s more, the EC wants Netflix to give these titles significant prominence within the algorithmic recommendation system it uses to personalise content for each user. In other words, licensing a bunch of cheap Italian B-movies and burying them in the catalogue won’t cut it; the EC expects the mandated content to be as discoverable as the Hollywood hits. This would mean changes to the way Netflix’s algorithms work, given that content recommendation is tailored to an individual’s viewing history. As such, it would break new ground for local-content regulation.

Finally, the EC is also leaving open the option for member states to demand cash commitments by streaming services to national film and TV financing schemes, as a condition of doing business in those countries – in the same way that many European media broadcasters and cinema chains now contribute to national production funds.

These are major proposals, and it remains to be seen if all of them will be implemented. But the implications for media policy in other parts of the world are significant. Australians in particular should note these developments, given that many of the same concerns about local content and Hollywood domination in streaming services have been intensely debated here.

Let’s take a closer look at some of these issues, starting with the local content “problem.” Is there a local content deficit on Netflix? And if so, what can be done about it?

Writing on Netflix’s content strategy in 2012, when the service had just started rolling out to Europe and Latin America, Variety observed that “Netflix’s strength is still the Hollywood product that the whole world wants to see,” noting that the company’s general formula in overseas territories was “about 80 per cent American shows and 20 per cent local.”

Recent research confirms this trend. A 2015 European Audiovisual Observatory report, which focused on the origin of movies in Netflix’s European catalogues, concluded that “the average EU Netflix catalogue “has 1151 titles, of which 21 per cent are of EU origin and 6 per cent of national origin [local content].” The report notes variations from country to country: in Europe, Netflix France has a higher proportion of local films, whereas the British catalogue is the most Hollywood-centric.

Experts in Australia have also noted the low levels of local content in the Netflix catalogue. As Alexa Scarlata wrote in 2015, “A month into its service, Netflix had made thirty-four local films (mostly comedic) available in a specific ‘Australian Movies’ category (out of the 1047 films available), as well as a sub-genre of more than thirty ‘Australian TV Shows’ (out of the 317 television programs available).”

As these figures suggest, film and TV licensing have different dynamics. There is more Australian TV than cinema on Netflix, reflecting audiences’ historically higher preference for localism in TV content than in movies. But it’s important to note these are back-catalogue series licensed from the local networks. Unlike its local competitors Stan and Presto, Netflix has not commissioned any original Australian series.

This is a bone of contention for local screen industry groups including Screen Producers Australia, whose president, Matthew Deaner, yesterday released a statement in support of the European quota model:

These are big, disruptive, successful businesses that have had time to expand in the Australian market without making any significant investment in local production. It’s time they step up to the plate and contribute to new Australian film and television production…

[N]ow is the time to create a level regulatory playing field that ensures responsible and fair engagement from both local and businesses with our sector and Australian audiences.

The free-to-air networks are weighing into the debate as well. Sensing an opportunity to push a different agenda, Nine Entertainment’s Hugh Marks lost no time in pointing out that Netflix’s unfair advantage was evidence of the need to reduce local content commitments across the board:

I’m not in favour of additional content regulation on any platform… I’m in favour of less regulation.

Having said that, it would be nice to see some consistency in how various services are treated. Certainly, you’d want to ensure that these big SVOD [subscription video on-demand] players here are collecting GST and also paying the right corporate tax in Australia based on the profits they’re making out of this market.

As these statements indicate, industry arguments about local content often reflect stakeholder interests. All too often the “local content” argument becomes a foil for something else entirely: a debate about tax, or competition, or industry support, or subsidy.

(The same could be said for the other big item on the Australian cultural policy agenda in 2016 – removal of parallel import restrictions on books – which is similarly characterised by a perceived opposition between cultural-nationalist protectionism and free-market laissez-faire. I write perceived, because, as Emmett Stinson bravely suggests in Overland, the cultural claims of the parallel import argument are somewhat disconnected from the underlying political-economic issues in book trading.)

So, notwithstanding the stakeholder politics, the take-home point about Netflix is fairly clear. At present, Netflix is essentially a vehicle for distributing US content. Local content is a marginal aspect of its business model in Australia, as in most other territories. This may change over time as the company develops a deeper understanding of its global markets, but for the moment at least we should not expect that Netflix will behave otherwise. To do so would be to naively overestimate the value of “Australian content” to a company that has no real need to play that game at all.

Underlying the debate about Netflix’s commitment to Australian production is a deeper set of questions about local content itself – its definition, measurement and inherent value. These are all unresolved issues for cultural policy makers, and they loom like a spectre over our local content debates.

First, there are questions of definition. What do we actually mean by “local,” especially in a context where most Australian screen production is in some way, in terms of its style, aesthetics or production context (via co-productions, for example)? Screen Australia has an established formula for determining such matters, the Significant Australian Content test, but the outcomes are frequently contested.

A second issue relates to the utility of local content for audiences. As the European Commission’s new rules acknowledge, the mere presence of local content in schedules or services does not mean that it will necessarily be watched by audiences, so we have to consider usage and distribution as well when assessing local content availability.

Finally, there is a question about cultural value. The fact that content is local does not mean it will be valued as such by audiences, nor that it will resonate in the way intended by its producers or funding bodies (indeed, “foreign” content can often teach us more about the Australian experience than locally produced content). Local content does not automatically equal local cultural value.

Notwithstanding these important qualifications, there is broad consensus that local content quotas – as part of a larger package of policy measures – are desirable elements of media regulation in most nations. The political calculus of “Australian stories” and cultural nationalism in this sense acts as a natural counterweight for the deregulatory drive. So local content quotas will remain a feature of Australian media regulation for some time to come, and for very good reason.

The question facing policymakers now is about how and whether broadcast-era standards should be extrapolated to streaming services and video-on-demand sites, which have a completely different structure and geography from broadcast media. These issues have been considered before, notably in the 2012 Convergence Review (which proposed the new category of “Content Service Enterprise” as a workaround for this problem), and in academic work on media regulation. But they keep popping up again as new technologies and new platforms come online and present us with the same old questions about the fate of local content.

Netflix is merely the latest stage in this longer game.

A lot of the heat and light in this debate comes from the fact that we still haven’t figured out what kind of a media service Netflix is. Is it a broadcaster? If so, then the claims that it gets a free ride compared to local incumbents do make some sense. Or is it, as its CEO Reed Hastings claims, an “internet television network” – and what is the difference between these two things anyway?

In one sense, it all comes down to geography. Netflix is based firmly in Los Gatos, California; it operates in over 190 countries, and is committed to these markets for its future growth, but the nature of its business is such that it does not need to have much in the way of infrastructure or investment in those territories.

It operates at a distance, with everything controlled from its Californian headquarters. Like many new-economy companies, it provides a service to European and Australian consumers without necessarily being in those markets in the conventional sense (a legal grey-zone that tech giants are naturally adept at exploiting).

So, from the perspective of global media policy, the EC’s Netflix quota is a significant development. It confirms European regulators’ appetite for high-stakes stoushes with Silicon Valley (as also seen in recent tax and antitrust actions against Google and Apple). If implemented, the quota would open the way for a more interventionist approach to cultural regulation of digital services across Europe, and potentially elsewhere. And it would challenge the Silicon Valley doxa that local laws and cultural policy cannot simply be transposed verbatim onto the non-Euclidean territories of cyberspace without “breaking the internet.”

Anyway, these are all moot points given that EU-style content regulation for streaming services has been ruled out in Australia. This week communications minister Mitch Fifield has made it known that the government has no plans for changes to local content rules, certainly not in the middle of an election campaign.

So, no Netflix quota for the time being. But the complexities and contradictions of the local content debate will stay with us. •

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Perhaps the most striking aspect of the Mallah controversy, which has already produced two official inquiries, a mooted divisional reorganisation at the ABC, and a Coalition frontbench boycott, is how quickly the terms of the discussion shifted to suit the federal government’s long-running credibility war with the national broadcaster.

Tony Abbott accused the ABC of not being on Australia’s “side.” Other Coalition MPs suggested the ABC created a public safety risk by putting Mallah on air, and that his hate speech against prominent female journalists should have disqualified him from any media coverage at all. But the government’s take-home point, working as a master narrative underlying these criticisms, was that the Mallah incident revealed a systemic bias within the ABC, and that the broadcaster’s “error of judgement” was symptomatic of its sympathy for various left causes (a category now expanded to include Islamic extremism).

In his blunt but effective way, Abbott re-engineered the terms of the Mallah conversation to conform to his characterisation of the ABC as a “leftie lynch mob.” This was no surprise, given the distaste for the ABC expressed by most Coalition MPs, particularly those on the hard right of the party. While Abbott’s strategic thinking is clear, it is worth carefully scrutinising the justifications underlying these attacks, and the expectations placed on Q&A as a result.

To take the government at its word, this is a question of representation. Coalition MPs argue that Q&A fails in its mission to give voice to a diverse cross-section of community views, and that its microcosm of Australian political culture consistently over-represents the left. As Coalition senator James McGrath suggested during a Senate estimates hearing in May:

We have a flagship program here that consistently shows bias [against] those on the right or centre-right of politics. There will be someone from right of centre – on a good week two people who are centre or right of centre – and then three people who are clearly left of centre or clearly not supporters of the Coalition.

Abbott has made similar comments about Q&A’s “unrepresentative” nature, and the point has been echoed in public statements by many frontbenchers. But what does it mean to be representative or unrepresentative? What are the criteria against which this claim could fairly be judged?

There are at least two ways of thinking about representation as it applies to Q&A. The first is to assess representation in terms of how Q&A positions itself along a left–right spectrum and how adequately it gives voice to the political positions along this line. This is how the ABC’s inquiry, led by Ray Martin and Shaun Brown, is likely to approach the issue, using what media researchers call content analysis – counting guests, questions and time devoted to particular issues, designating them as left-leaning or right-leaning, and then arriving at some kind of determination of where Q&A lies on this spectrum.

This is a fairly impoverished way to think about representation. It relies on a static, one-dimensional model of politics, whose boundaries and centre are determined by the federal parliament of the day rather than by any sense of what matters to Australians. It also means that issues, particularly social policy issues, that don’t fit a ready-made left-to-right discourse struggle to be considered as properly political.

The assumption is that all Australians’ political views fall somewhere along the left-to-right axis, which is of course calibrated to the values of the major political parties. Within this context, the ABC is obliged to strive for a middle position, to occupy a “sensible centre” while giving some coverage to views positioned further (but not too far) in either direction.

The political strategy for both major parties is to try to shift the landscape so that their position appears closest to the centre. In the case of the Coalition’s response to Mallah, this means quarantining certain commonsense arguments – such as the suggestion that hard-line anti-terrorism rhetoric might be fuelling the recruiting efforts of ISIS and other groups – as beyond the bounds of the sayable. In the wake of the Q&A episode, this argument is now considered outrageous by virtue of the fact that it was aired by a disreputable and unpleasant individual. The real issue here is not so much Mallah’s right to be heard as how the boundaries of the political can conveniently be redrawn by such confected outrage.

The second way to think about representation is to ask how a program like Q&A might give voice to the political views of the population as a whole, as opposed to how it constructs a left–right discourse around the policy issues of the day. This is a difficult task, of course: it would require more complex and inventive approaches to audience and panel selection, topics and moderation. It is hard to see how Q&A’s usual audience (mainly made up of Young Liberal/Labor hacks, precocious students and partisan stakeholders) could reasonably constitute a nationally representative sample. But it is still a noble ideal, and one worth striving for.

Many other current affairs programs, including SBS’s Insight, try to do something along these lines. At the least, taking seriously this deeper notion of political representation would reveal that the narrow terrain of disagreement between Labor and Liberal that constitutes much of what passes for debate on Q&A does not represent anywhere near the extent of political culture in Australia.

Many Australians, for better or worse, struggle to see themselves anywhere on a left–right spectrum. As conceived in federal parliamentary politics, this spectrum is often dramatically out of alignment with the wider range of views in the Australian population, in terms both of the scope of debate and where the centre of gravity sits on particular issues. On asylum matters, for example, the difference between Liberal and Labor policies is now so slim as to be non-existent. On social policy issues like gay marriage, there is a yawning gulf between the politicians and the population. There are many other examples; the point is that to calibrate “representation” according to the positions of the major parties is to forego the possibility of a more far-reaching representation of the actual political views of the Australian population, whatever they may be.

Q&A, to its credit, does try hard to include a wider spectrum of opinion. Many of its most stimulating episodes feature interventions by speakers – including artists, activists and philosophers – from outside federal politics. The program is in the difficult position of having to juggle this idea-raising function with the tedious and unedifying spectacle of “balanced” coverage of Liberal–Labor disagreements. Its producers do a good job of managing the tensions, under very difficult circumstances.

But let’s not pretend that this constitutes meaningful political representation. If the ABC, and the government for that matter, were serious about wanting Q&A to “represent the views of the Australian population,” we’d have a different kind of program, one that spent considerably less time providing a space for Labor–Liberal policy disputes. But neither side of politics really wants to see that. •

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Little of what an invention might do to us, and for us, is predetermined; instead, its possibilities and dangers typically arise from how it is adopted, used and commercialised by humans – how, in Kranzberg’s words, it “interacts in different ways with different values and institutions.”

This lesson about the perils of determinism, something that all students of media history learn in their earliest lectures, is one that writer and Silicon Valley insider Andrew Keen seems hell-bent on challenging in his latest book, The Internet Is Not the Answer, an engaging but infuriating manifesto about digital culture.

Keen, a San Francisco–based writer and erstwhile dotcom entrepreneur, is the author of two other books about the internet, The Cult of the Amateur and Digital Vertigo. He has forged a reputation as a Silicon Valley insider-critic, a self-styled contrarian raging against the excesses of the West Coast elite. Well connected among industry figures, he hosts his own TechCrunch web TV series, Keen On, in which he chews the fat of internet culture with guests like Tim O’Reilly, Stewart Brand and Jaron Lanier.

The Internet Is Not the Answer is the latest instalment in Keen’s franchise, at the heart of which is a simple but shaky argument about the internet’s effects on society and culture:

Rather than creating transparency and openness, the internet is creating a panopticon of information-gathering and surveillance services in which we, the users of big data networks like Facebook, have been packaged as their all-too-transparent product. Rather than creating more democracy, it is empowering the rule of the mob. Rather than encouraging tolerance, it has unleashed such a distasteful war on women that many no longer feel welcome on the network. Rather than fostering a renaissance, it has created a selfie-centred culture of voyeurism and narcissism. Rather than establishing more diversity, it is massively enriching a tiny group of young white men in black limousines. Rather than making us happy, it’s compounding our rage.

The book begins with a compressed history of the development of the internet couched in a narrative of moral decline. Keen tells a story of the internet’s commercialisation, from its origins as a publicly funded piece of communications infrastructure run by a small coterie of geeks to today’s “social web,” in which value is created through commodification of our everyday communication.

As evidence, he offers some vivid snapshots of West Coast speculators including Sequoia Capital chairman Michael Moritz, an early investor in Google; Netscape founder Marc Andreessen; and the libertarian billionaire Tom Perkins, partner at the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers venture capital firm and author of a recent, explosive Wall Street Journal opinion piece railing against “the progressive war on the American one per cent” in the age of Occupy.

The general narrative here is about capture of a utopian technology by venture capital, against a backdrop of Uber helicopters, private jets and exclusive Bay Area members’ clubs. “As Wall Street moved west,” writes Keen, “the internet lost a sense of common purpose, a general decency, perhaps even its soul.”

Keen then turns his attention to our “privatised network economy,” in which a small group of monopoly platforms dominate. He rehearses familiar claims about how users are exploited on social platforms, arguing that “it’s our labour on these little devices – our incessant tweeting, posting, searching, updating, reviewing, commenting and snapping – that is creating all the value in the networked economy.” He also reminds us of the ostensible erosion of “middle-class jobs” in a context of free user labour.

Later chapters explore the precarious situation of artists and writers whose livelihoods have been negatively affected by the internet, interspersed with angry critiques of selfie culture, cyberbullying, drones, 3D printing, and various other topics.

As Keen’s title and tone suggest, this is a populist manifesto rather than a sustained argument. Some of the claims are convincing, but Keen’s reliance on inflammatory rhetoric undercuts his credibility. Reminiscent of the work of net critic Evgeny Morozov, but far less satisfying, The Internet Is Not the Answer delights in taking the contrarian position on every conceivable aspect of internet culture.

A more serious problem with the book is its derivative nature. Keen’s opinions on a range of topics – from free digital labour to the “1 per cent economy” – come straight from the mind-hive of tech blogs and Silicon Valley watchers. The reference list is liberally peppered with articles from the Atlantic and the New Yorker. There is little in Keen’s book to interest readers who already follow those discussions.

For these reasons, I struggled to take the book seriously. There’s a certain charm in Keen’s crusading style, but it quickly becomes tiring.

But Keen’s work does seem to strike a chord with many readers. Newspaper reviews of The Internet Is Not the Answer have been surprisingly tolerant of his excesses. So perhaps the value of the book has more to do with how it captures popular anxieties than whether it advances new ideas.

Indeed, a charitable view might see the book as a compendium of current moral panics about internet culture – the kind of source that historians will one day turn to as a representative index of digital fears and phobias, circa 2015. Like a Luddite caricature from the nineteenth century, it distils social anxieties into memorable stories.

In this sense, Keen may be a man of his time. But readers searching for genuine insight into our wired world would be advised to look elsewhere. •

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THE politics of the internet are not always easy to get your head around. As we have seen over the past few years, debates about regulatory issues – broadband availability, network neutrality, privacy and so on – bring together diverse interest groups and arrange them in weird combinations. In last year’s landmark campaign against America’s Stop Online Piracy Act, which climaxed with the blackout of Wikipedia, Google and Facebook campaigned side by side with librarians, conspiracy theorists and Hollywood celebrities. Old categories like left/right and progressive/conservative don’t always make much sense in this volatile political field.

This problem is evident in two recent books, Robert McChesney’s Digital Disconnect and Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future?. Both present a broadly left-liberal critique of the internet society, focusing on the data economy. Both reserve particular scorn for Web 2.0. Both are unapologetically polemical. Yet there are deep differences in their thinking, reflecting the ideological gulf that separates Marxist and cyber-collectivist theories of the internet.

Let’s start with Digital Disconnect. McChesney, a well-known political economist from the University of Illinois, has been writing about broadcasting, advertising and journalism for decades. He is the co-founder of Free Press, a US media reform organisation, and a tireless campaigner on media ownership and regulation. Digital Disconnect is his thirteenth book. Like its predecessors, it is lucid and alarming.

The book explores what McChesney describes as “the marriage of capitalism and the internet and the resulting crisis of communication and democracy in the digital era.” It is an ambitious study, which tries to get at the underlying economic logics of the digital age and how they shape everyday communications. His focus is mostly on the United States, and on topics like the search engine market, app stores, technical standards, cloud computing and net neutrality.

Readers familiar with McChesney’s previous work won’t be surprised to hear that he is gloomy about the wired economy. “It is supremely ironic,” he argues, “that the internet, the much-ballyhooed champion of increased consumer power and cut-throat competition, has become one of the greatest generators of monopoly in economic history.” The book’s general argument is that we are moving into “a private sphere of increasingly closed, proprietary, even monopolistic markets” and towards the “capitalist colonisation of the internet.”

McChesney is good at foregrounding big-picture questions: why the structure of the digital economy matters; how it affects our lives; how it produces power, freedom, inequality and exploitation. His cynicism is a refreshing palate-cleanser after the liberal technophilia of writers like Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig. But I worried that McChesney’s interpretation was a little too pat, a little too easy.

From the outset it is clear that the internet will play a predetermined role in McChesney’s story, as the latest surface for capitalist expansion and domination. This is in line with McChesney’s early work on broadcasting; anyone who has read those books will know the narrative well. But McChesney’s is a one-sided account: it leaves all the grey areas unexplored. His observations about digital markets magically seem to fit his longstanding template.

In this sense, Digital Disconnect recalls an earlier moment of media critique when the enemy was clearly defined and the role of the critic was to provide consciousness-raising intelligence. As a manifesto against the internet economy, Digital Disconnect is powerful. But as an analysis of how that economy operates and where it might be headed, it has rather less to say.

WHILE McChesney writes as a hard-headed political economist, Jaron Lanier adopts a rather different persona: the disillusioned insider. A Silicon Valley computer scientist, virtual reality pioneer, and former Microsoft employee, Lanier has a long history in the US tech industry. These days he makes a living as a critic of this world. Who Owns the Future?, like his previous book You Are Not a Gadget, offers us a distinctive vision of the internet society and its failings. Equal parts libertarian, collectivist, Romantic and cyber-humanist, his political identity seems itself to be a product of the tech cultures that he so distrusts.

At the core of the book is a critique of the data businesses – the “Siren Servers” – that divide the info-rich and the info-poor. Lanier is particularly concerned with the missing “middle-class jobs” that have been eroded by the winner-takes-all economy of Web 2.0 commerce:

I want digital networking to cause more value from people to be on the books, rather than less… At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people.

Where did all those jobs disappear to? And what happened to the wealth that those middle-class jobs created?

In contrast to the jackpot economy of app creation and the one-way traffic of data harvesting, Lanier proposes a system of “nanopayments” as a solution (the final chapters describe the system in detail). In his view, such an infrastructure would redistribute our information capital in a more equitable way, reducing the stratification of the big data economy.

This aspect of Lanier’s argument provides a way around the debate between content companies and rights-holders (who seek stronger protection of information online) and free culture enthusiasts (who promote open, unfettered circulation of all knowledge). Lanier has no time for either side.

While it is always interesting, Who Owns the Future? doesn’t move far beyond the level of polemics. It is full of ideas that seem brilliant from a distance but tend to dissolve when examined up close. Take, for example, Lanier’s Instagram story. The comparison between Instagram and Kodak works as an attention-grab but does it tell us anything meaningful about the internet economy? These two businesses are not directly comparable: one is a software company and intermediary, while the other is in hardware and services.

No doubt many economists would argue that, rather than simply disappearing, the “good” jobs Kodak provided have actually been dispersed across a number of other sectors, including mobile phone producers and IT maintenance companies. There may even be more such jobs today. But Lanier is not interested in complications like this.

Despite his professed concern for real workers, I got the feeling that Lanier prefers to keep his ideas at the level of free-wheeling abstraction. Who Owns the Future? is a speculative text: its modus operandi is to translate problems in software design onto a wider socioeconomic plane. This is exciting at times, but it can also be frustrating. The issues that Lanier raises seem too important to treat casually.

While I found much to like in both of these books, neither Lanier nor McChesney provide a wholly satisfying account of where the internet economy is going. As polemics, they are a lot of fun. But as theories of the digital economy, they need a defrag. •

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THE first public mobile phone call was made just over forty years ago, on 3 April 1973. The caller was a Motorola engineer in New York City. The phone was a cream-coloured brick, a prototype of the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, which weighed a kilogram and took ten hours to charge.

Over the past few weeks the international media has been throwing a birthday party for what is now a middle-aged technology (if you missed the festivities, try tiny.cc/40phone). The nostalgic photos of flip-phones and classic Nokias remind us how far the technology has come.

As it enters its fifth decade, the mobile is the centrepiece of a US$800 billion industry. Ubiquitous in virtually every nation, it has displaced the personal computer as the focus of investment and innovation in consumer technologies.

In recent years a growing body of research has been documenting the cultural history of mobile technology, exploring the diverse ways in which it shapes public and private life. Three recent books on the topic capture a representative sample of the fascinating debates under way.

WHILE early studies of mobiles focused on communications practices, researchers are increasingly interested in the mobile’s new status as a digital content platform. Moving Data explores this theme through a collection of short, scholarly essays. It approaches Apple’s iPhone from the perspective of media theory, seeing it as a paradigmatic object that crystallises a larger shift in the way culture is produced and distributed.

As the book’s editors argue, the iPhone brings with it a “convergence of technologies, cultures, and marketing practices that were previously thought incommensurable.” The contributors to Moving Data investigate, from different angles, this common theme — the coming together of tech companies, with experience producing hardware or online search, and the classic content industries of cinema and broadcasting, under the sign of the mobile.

This is a striking feature of today’s media landscape, but we are still grappling with its implications. Moving Data is very useful in this respect, offering absorbing case studies and critical analyses that help to put the changes in context. I particularly enjoyed Pelle Snickars’s chapter, which explores the debate about Apple’s App Store, the “walled garden” that provokes passionate criticism yet has fostered innovation; Göran Bolin’s philosophical ruminations on the history of mobile media technologies; and the chapters on regulation and corporate strategy by Jennifer Holt, Alisa Perren and Karen Petruska.

The book has a European skew, reflecting the backgrounds of many of its contributors, which makes for a welcome addition to the literature on the iPhone, a publishing genre dominated by American tech journalists.

Like Moving Data, Studying Mobile Media is concerned with convergence as a logic of today’s mobile industries. Despite what the title suggests, this is not a textbook but a collection of essays on different aspects of mobile industries and culture. The publisher’s hardback pricing might make this book one for libraries only (though many of the chapters can be found in draft online).

Together, the essays cover a representative spread of current debates, and are complemented by three case studies that focus on South Korea, China and Finland — nations with contrasting traditions of mobile take-up and use.

The book opens with a series of conceptual chapters, including a marvellous analysis by Brisbane-based media scholar Jean Burgess that frames “the iPhone moment” in relation to debates about innovation, creativity and gender. It then moves into some new and exciting areas, such as mobile gaming, mapping and photography. The mobile’s impact on each of these areas is hard to overstate.

Take photography: as the chapter by Daniel Palmer notes, the phone manufacturer Nokia has likely put “more cameras into people’s hands than in the whole previous history of photography.” Yet this boom in image-making has coincided with new social anxieties. Palmer’s essay explores the increasingly complex moral terrain of mobile photography in public places, like beaches and malls, where concerns about “upskirting” and other mobile-enabled nastiness make it difficult for professional photographers to shoot in the way they used to. But he also notes that today’s situation recalls an earlier age of photographic democratisation, at the end of the nineteenth century, when newly portable cameras created similar panics about “hand-camera fiends.”

Labour is another area of concern of this book. The question of who makes our devices, who does the coding for the apps, and who creates the value-added content necessary for social platforms is emerging as a renewed focus of debate. This theme appears throughout the essays, especially in chapters by Jack Linchuan Qiu — who examines the scandal around Foxconn, an Apple supplier whose Guangdong factory has been the site of strikes and suicides — and John Banks, who considers the shifting modes of production that underlie the development of mobile games.

THIS brings us to our third book, The Great Indian Phone Book, which has a more specific story to tell. India — a nation of 1.2 billion people and fifteen official languages, where the growth of telecom industries has been explosive — makes for a unique vantage point. In 1998, there were fewer than a million mobiles in India. Fourteen years later, the number of mobiles had leapt to almost 900 million. This is all the more remarkable given that most people had little engagement with fixed-line telephony, a technology reserved for elites and public servants.

In The Great Indian Phone Book, Robin Jeffrey (a political scientist) and Assa Doron (an anthropologist) have produced a riveting study that traces the effects of mobile technology on the lives of everyday people, from the fishermen who can now more effectively set the price of their catch to the electronic technicians who make a living from repairing banged-up handsets.

India’s mobile revolution has been premised not on high-end smartphones, which are the focus of the other two books, but on cheap, durable handsets. Many phones have multiple-SIM capabilities, allowing budget-conscious users to switch between carriers to take advantage of special rates. Nokia, not Apple or Samsung, is the market leader. There is a lively trade in secondhand handsets, and informal repair businesses can be found in the smallest villages.

II enjoyed how The Great Indian Phone Book approaches mobile culture from many different angles, including telecommunications policy (the skulduggery of spectrum auctions), cultural-economic history (the ad campaigns that market the mobile lifestyle), and infrastructure (the art of mobile tower construction). This is a 360- degree vision of mobile culture, grounded in everyday life but with a historical consciousness and a deep understanding of India’s cultural politics.

The book’s most absorbing parts are the ethnographic portraits that introduce us to a cross-section of Indian society, all touched in some way by the mobile. Readers will encounter peasants, parents, professionals, entrepreneurs, lovers, criminals and everyone in between.

With The Great Indian Phone Book, Jeffrey and Doron offer a timely reminder that mobile cultures are moving in many directions simultaneously. With convergence, the technological gap between the mobile and other devices is closing — but the uses to which the mobile is put around the world remain impossibly diverse. •

• Read an edited extract from The Great Indian Phone Book

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FANS of TV crime shows may have been alarmed to read last year that the BBC was planning to reduce its enormous output of cop dramas, murder mysteries and serial-killer sagas in an attempt to reinvigorate its programming mix. There’s “too much crime” and “too many male detectives”, said BBC1 controller Danny Cohen. “I want to broaden the palette a bit."

If that was the plan, it doesn’t seem to be working – not yet, anyway. Australian TV viewers are seeing more British bobbies than ever before. The ABC has given us the latest seasons of Luther, Ashes to Ashes, Spooks, New Tricks and Dalziel and Pascoe, along with new franchises like the Roman detective drama/romance Zen, starring Rufus Sewell. On the Eurocrime front, SBS has come to the party with season 2 of The Killing and the latest Wallander telemovies. And at home, the ABC has invested serious money in two new locally-produced series – The Straits and Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. How can we explain the enduring popularity of crime, this most dog-eared of genres?

Perhaps our appetite for law and disorder has something to do with the genre’s flexibility. TV crime is constantly being reinvented as established traditions give way to new experiments with storytelling and style. Today’s social anxieties and moral panics are integrated into old narrative forms. As the film theorist Steve Neale famously argued, “genres are instances of repetition and difference” – and a look at the current schedules of Australian broadcasters provides ample evidence for this claim.

The trick to a successful crime series seems to be keeping the essential ingredients in place while adding spice in the form of new settings, character types and narrative devices. Hence we have had time-travelling cops (Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes), ultra-gritty handheld realism (Southland), and impossibly complex storylines (The Killing), but all reliant on the interplay of mystery and revelation that is at the heart of criminal fictions.

Take, for example, the second season of Luther, a BBC-produced police procedural starring Idris Elba (The Wire). A conventional renegade-detective drama, Luther treads a fine line between transgression and sentimentality. The Independent described it as “a loose constellation of cop-show clichés”, and that’s exactly the point. The fun of Luther is seeing how and when these elements come together, and which special spices make it into the mix.

Luther’s second season, currently screening on ABC1, is style over substance in the best possible way. Every detail of the production is painstakingly cool, from the green-grey palette to the Massive Attack soundtrack and the bohemian villains. While retaining the grimy urban aesthetic of much Britcrime, it jettisons the social-realist tendencies of shows like Taggart or Prime Suspect in favour of a more kinetic, cinematic look. Luther doesn’t always make a lot of sense, but as an adventure in art direction it is pretty hard to beat.

Season two of The Killing (Forbrydelsen) is a different kind of beast. Its experimentation is all at the level of narrative, and its special sauce is its Byzantine plotting. The taciturn Copenhagen detective Sarah Lund is once more given the task of getting to the bottom of a grisly crime – the murder of an army lawyer. The field of suspects is huge, and one by one they come under suspicion: an unhinged soldier, a government minister, an army commander, a dodgy imam, a police officer. The investigation takes place against a backdrop of federal politics, as the Danish coalition government tries to piece together a new anti-terrorist law while harnessing populist xenophobia for its own ends. If you saw the first season of The Killing, or its American remake, you will know the general structure.

The Killing takes great care with its muted urban aesthetic – like Luther, it is full of dazzling night-time helicopter shots – but the emphasis is always on the build-up and release of tension. This is the kind of show Alfred Hitchcock might have enjoyed making after watching five seasons of The Wire back to back. The Killing takes great delight in adding layer upon layer of intrigue: a murder investigation becomes our entry point into an ever-widening circle of corruption.

Smaller media markets like Australia find it difficult to produce shows on a par with The Killing, which was financed by a network of affluent Scandinavian public-service broadcasters. But the ABC is giving it a red-hot go in 2012. Its two latest flagship dramas are Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries and The Straits. A new season of the legal black comedy Rake and a pair of telemovies based on Peter Temple’s Jack Irish novels is also on the way.

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries is equal parts costume comedy, crime show and National Trust advertisement. Essie Davis, fresh from her star turn in The Slap, stars as the redoutable Phryne Fisher, an amateur sleuth in 1920s Melbourne. Davis is great but the real talent is off-screen: Miss Fisher is all about the costumes, sets and props (think pearl-handled pistols, well-upholstered Edwardian matrons and larrikins in flat caps). With its feet firmly planted in the cosy mystery genre of Miss Marple and Midsomer Murders, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, but there’s plenty to like here.

For my money, though, The Straits is the more interesting show. It revolves around an extended family of drug smugglers, the Montebellos, and their ageing father (played by British screen veteran Brian Cox) who must choose a successor among three adopted sons. Aaron Fa’aoso, Firass Dirani and Jimi Bani play the brothers, with Rena Owen (Once Were Warriors) cast as the family’s Torres Strait Islander matriarch. Each episode is a romp through a different part of the Oceania underworld – from meth labs in Papua New Guinea to the ecstasy trade in Cairns. The Montebello clan, their offsiders and their various lovers oversee this empire, cutting deals with the cops and the local bikie gang when needed.

Like all crime dramas, The Straits is a remix of familiar elements: a family succession melodrama, a gangster epic, a tropical fantasia. Its special spice is the way it reimagines the Top End as an integrated region of transnational crime. While the Anglo-Islander Montebello family, the white bikies, the PNG Raskols and the gangs down south inevitably butt heads – these turfwars are the fuel which drives the series forward – the general impression we’re left with is of a prosperous, interconnected, and relatively harmonious criminal community, which takes in not only tropical Queensland but also PNG, the Tiwi Islands and the Torres Strait.

The Straits is the only TV show I have seen that uses a popular genre to explore Australia’s interdependence with its neighbours. The multiethnic Australia of The Straits is intimately involved in the Pacific, and vice versa, for mutual benefit. These relations are not about aid, refugees, military intervention, white man’s burden or colonial compassion. They are about crime and profit. There is something to be said for this view of the region.

Of course, portraying Papua New Guinea as a land of gun-runners does not count as a “progressive” representation according to the standard script of media diversity, in which marginal communities should be represented positively or not at all. But I think that’s the point the show is trying to make. The Straits seems keen to break out of this. While SBS’s East West 101 used the police-procedural genre as a pretext for an exploration of suburban xenophobia and institutionalised racism, The Straits avoids this locked-down dialectic of centre and margins. There are no victims here, no traditions under threat from modernity – only different shades of criminality. “Tribal” communities are reimagined as smuggling syndicates. Islander kinship systems become vehicles for surveillance and information-gathering. In one episode, a shipwrecked Sri Lankan asylum-seeker is plucked out of the water and immediately recruited as a Montebello henchman.

In The Straits, crime becomes a vehicle for intercultural commerce and contact. It is what ties everyone together. In this sense the show offers us a different vision of how and where Australia fits within the Asia-Pacific region. Buried within its reinvention of the crime genre are the seeds of postcolonial critique.

And so the genre’s evolution continues. Each series introduces permutations in a tried-and-tested formula, and new kinds of spice to keep us coming back for more. This year’s TV bounty has been a good one for murder-mystery junkies and police-procedural tragics. Let’s hope the crime wave continues. •

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FROM credit card fraud to politically motivated denial-of-service attacks, cybercrime is never far from the headlines. But while there is no shortage of sensationalist coverage, it is much harder to find detailed accounts of the people and the processes behind these activities. Tracking amorphous networks of hackers presents a challenge for even the most enterprising researcher.

Misha Glenny’s DarkMarket: CyberThieves, CyberCops and You is the latest book to give it a shot. Glenny, an investigative journalist and sometime contributor to the Economist, is a first-rate storyteller with unparalleled knowledge of the Eastern European and Balkan underworlds. His 2008 book McMafia is a gripping study of the globalisation of organised crime in the post-Soviet era. As a fan of his work, I was eager to get my hands on DarkMarket and to see what he makes of cybercrime. The results, though occasionally brilliant, are mixed.

Glenny focuses on “skimming” and “carding” – the manufacture and use of fake ATM and credit cards encoded with stolen customer details – and the networks through which these skills are refined and disseminated. As Glenny explains, skimming gave rise in the early 2000s to a complex ancillary industry that supplied the equipment needed to manufacture cards and provided information about new technologies and training for would-be skimmers. Through these networks a wide variety of individuals and organisations, from “black-hat” hacker collectives to state intelligence agencies, came into contact.

DarkMarket is a forensic case study of two now-defunct websites catering to the carder community: DarkMarket and CarderPlanet. In these online meeting places a motley collection of geeks from across the globe exchanged services and information. Glenny argues that these two sites were responsible for transforming carding from a hacker hobby into a multimillion-dollar criminal enterprise. (DarkMarket was eventually taken over by the FBI for use in sting operations.) Drawing on court transcripts and interviews with key players, he reconstructs the rise and fall of these sites and the people who used them.

Glenny’s book is at its best when it addresses the wider political and social contexts underlying the carder networks. In the second half of the book we are introduced to a group of Turkish hackers with intimate connections to key figures in the government, the media and the secret police. This bizarre tale offers a glimpse of the workings of Turkey’s “deep state,” in which surveillance, crime and capitalist enterprises morph into ever-newer configurations. This is Glenny’s specialty. His ability to bring to life the connections between politics and the underworld is peerless.

Elsewhere, DarkMarket is less successful. Much of the book feels like it has been banged out quickly, with minimal editing. Glenny frequently gets lost in inconsequential detail, and the book is marred by a technophobic moralism that often derails the more interesting analysis. The beauty of McMafia is its ability to weave together a grand narrative of crime-fuelled globalisation. Unfortunately there is no such vision on offer in DarkMarket, just a fragmentary – but still fascinating – account of one corner of a larger canvas.

J.C. Sharman’s The Money Laundry explores a similarly murky terrain – the world of transnational money laundering – but does so in a rather different way. Sharman, a professor of governance and public policy at Griffith University, is an expert on anti-laundering regulation and has published several books on this topic already. Though it is rather drier than its title suggests, The Money Laundry is nonetheless full of fascinating anecdotes about the workings of offshore banks, shady service providers and anonymous bearer-share companies.

Sharman’s key claim is that anti-money-laundering regulation – which all states must adopt in order to participate in international banking systems – is laughably ineffective. Furthermore, it places an unduly heavy burden on developing nations, even though most laundering happens in the global North. To prove this point, Sharman goes about setting up dozens of fake shell companies, approaching intermediaries in various countries around the world with a request for “anonymous” banking. The result? Agents in the Caymans, Antigua, Cyprus and other islands of ill repute prove to be more law-abiding than those in OECD nations. As Sharman notes, “even the laxest offshore bank has due diligence standards far higher than those applied by major US institutions.”

What emerges from Sharman’s detailed account is a glimpse of the realpolitik of international financial regulation and its selective enforcement regimes. Along the way, the reader will discover many fascinating details about how the offshore banking system works. I loved the accounts of byzantine transnational laundering systems connecting, for example, a Dutch ecstasy dealer and his UK distribution network with an anonymous bearer-share company, a crooked Panamanian lawyer, a Netherlands Antilles “management” company, and a fictitious Dutch real estate operation.

The Money Laundry addresses an audience of regulatory specialists rather than general readers. While Glenny’s account of electronic fraud verges on the sensationalist, Sharman’s dry prose sucks out much of the drama from the otherwise fascinating narrative. Political scientists and policy analysts will find much of value here, but other readers may be scared off by chapter titles like “An Indirect Test of Effectiveness.” This is a shame, for together these books offer a valuable take on an endlessly fascinating subject. •

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CHUNGKING Mansions, a down-at-heel complex of shops, guesthouses and restaurants in the heart of Hong Kong’s Tsim Sha Tsui district, is arguably the most infamous building in this 24/7 city. A second home to traders from across the developing world, it is a bustling zone of informal commerce. DVDs, appliances, garments, precious metals, medicines, books, mobile phones – almost anything can be bought here, off the books and in wholesale quantities. Entrepreneurs from across Africa, South Asia and the Middle East come to make their fortune, returning home with suitcases full of gadgets and gear.

Although most locals are put off by the building’s reputation for vice and the pushy touts who congregate outside, Chungking Mansions attracts a diverse mix of tourists, exiles and third-world traders. Asylum seekers find opportunities for work and for conversation in its labyrinthine corridors. European backpackers drop by for a taste of the demi-monde captured in Wong Kar Wai’s much-loved 1994 film Chungking Express. Others come seeking drugs, prostitutes or perhaps a curry at one of the excellent Indian restaurants. Chungking Mansions has something for everyone.

In Ghetto at the Center of the World – the first serious study of this remarkable building – anthropologist Gordon Mathews takes us deep into the lives of the people who live and work there. For Mathews, Chungking Mansions is more than a curiosity. As a hub of informal trade in Hong Kong’s turbo-capitalist present, it facilitates a specific kind of “low-end globalisation,” channelling untold quantities of goods, money and people around the globe, out of sight of the institutions of world trade. It is, he writes, “an alien island of the developing world lying in Hong Kong’s heart.”

Mathews’s study reads the global economy from the ground up. In 240-odd pages we learn of people smuggling gold across borders in their teeth, of Nepali Gurkhas selling heroin in back alleys, and of intricate systems for trading counterfeit and second-hand mobile phones. Mathews estimates that a fifth of Africa’s mobiles come from Chungking Mansions, and his analysis of how this trading system works is one of the most fascinating things I’ve read in a long time.

Mathews writes in an unadorned, no-nonsense style, with the intention of documenting – rather than celebrating or critiquing – the rhythms of this trading mecca. Based on several years of fieldwork, the book weaves together the stories of hundreds of store-holders, landlords, asylum seekers and workers interviewed by the author and his assistants. Edited interview transcripts with workers and residents lend rich ethnographic detail to Mathews’s arguments.

Some of these first-person accounts are very moving, detailing people’s attempts to make lives for themselves in an indifferent city. Mathews spends a lot of time discussing the fate of asylum seekers in Hong Kong, many of whom spend years – even decades – eking out a living in Chungking Mansions while waiting for their claims to be processed. Hong Kong’s lax visa policies mean that large numbers of people from Africa and South Asia can enter, but its asylum system is woefully inadequate at meeting their needs once they arrive. The cash-in-hand economy of Chungking Mansions often fills this gap.

Mathews's emphasis is firmly on the place, the people and the stories. Sometimes I wanted him to range a bit more widely, and to place these narratives into a broader analytical context. Mathews resists theorising, preferring to let the stories speak for themselves.

Perhaps this is a blessing in disguise. Amid all the loose talk about globalisation and neoliberalism that characterises contemporary academic debates, few writers have been able to provide better insights into how these processes play out at ground level. Anyone interested in the way our international economy actually functions will enjoy this marvellous book. •

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The publication of Robert Manne’s Bad News, an impassioned 25,000-word critique of the Australian, comes amidst a series of headaches for News Corp, including an acrimonious feud with the Gillard government, the announcement of an inquiry into print media regulation, and, of course, never-ending fallout from the phone-hacking scandal.

It’s no wonder that News is feeling tetchy. Manne’s polemic against the “overbearing character” and “unhealthy influence” of the Australian has generated a counter-attack from the paper’s editors, who laid into the essay with predictable ferocity. The Australian has now declared the discussion closed, but those who missed the war of words can catch up here and here.

Bad News consists of a number of case studies focusing on key issues around which the Australian has campaigned forcefully – either for (the Iraq war, the US alliance, Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History), or against (the emissions trading scheme, the Greens, Media Watch). The essay leaves the reader in little doubt as to the Australian’s consistent prosecution of a partisan political agenda. Stephen Conroy has recently described the Murdoch press as being in the business of “regime change” rather than reportage. Bad News provides ample evidence for this claim.

Manne’s essay also demonstrates the personal and vindictive way in which the Australian carries out its campaigns. In recent years we have seen a number of public figures – including David Marr and Simon Overland – become victims of sustained attacks from the paper’s journalists. The systematic character assassination of Sydney academic Larissa Behrendt at the hands of Patricia Karvelas – an episode Manne recounts in some detail – is one recent example.

I found much to admire in this detailed critique of the Australian and its lurch to the right. The essay marshals an array of evidence to substantiate the claim that the paper, under editor Chris Mitchell, has mutated into a “national enforcer” of neoliberal/market-fundamentalist values. As anyone who regularly reads the Australian knows, the paper has long since abandoned any attempt to weigh both sides when it comes to certain pet issues, and now operates more as what Manne describes as “a remorseless campaigning paper.”

Yet I can’t help feeling that Manne’s analysis, while reaching the right conclusions, has failed to ask the right questions. Part of this has to do with the fact that Manne appears to be more interested in discrediting the Australian than understanding how it works. As a result, Bad News is heavy on polemic and light on analysis and information. Beyond a few juicy details about the relationship between Mitchell and Kevin Rudd, there is relatively little new information on offer here.

Most of Manne’s essay is devoted to telling us, in a variety of ways, what we already know – that the Oz is a bastion of right-wing values, that it adheres closely to Rupert Murdoch’s own beliefs, and that it is a mouthpiece for mining companies, employer groups and conservative think tanks. This is a valuable critique, to be sure, but not an original one. And it leaves a lot of interesting questions unanswered.

For example, Manne does not attempt to explain why the paper continues to prosecute a hard anti–emissions trading scheme line even though Murdoch himself has apparently recanted on his climate change scepticism. Nor does Manne explain how the entire editorial staff of the paper – which includes some of the most intelligent journalists working in Australia today – can be so effectively corralled into toeing the party line day in and day out. After reading Bad News I am still at a loss to understand how this works in practice.

Most serious studies of newspapers would spend more time thinking about such things. But Manne is not really interested in these questions, preferring instead to wage war with the Oz on moral grounds (he even offers a four-page argument for why climate change science is correct – as if such a defence were needed). Perhaps this focus is understandable given Manne’s background. He is, after all, a specialist in Australian politics rather than the political economy of the media – a point made in Tad Tietze’s review of Bad News. Certainly, previous articles about Mitchell’s editorship have covered these questions in greater detail. But eliding the industrial contexts through which the Australian is produced works only to reduce the complexity and depth of the argument and, ultimately, the power of the intervention.

Nor do we get much of a sense of how, exactly, the Australian shapes our public culture and policy. Yes, we know the paper is full of partisan coverage (interspersed with first-rate journalism from the likes of George Megalogenis and Paul Kelly). Yes, we know that “the political class” reads it. But that isn’t to say that they take its campaigning seriously. There is no question that the paper plays a major role in setting the news agenda for the country, but the relationship between the Australian’s content and its impact is not as straightforward as Manne’s essay suggests.

This brings me to what is perhaps a deeper problem. Manne is so focused on the Australian’s role in reproducing right-wing ideology that he all but loses sight of the paper, which becomes a stand-in for the Australian right in general. This means that, all too frequently, Manne is not writing about the Australian; he is writing about the right, and how he feels about the right. Hence, the force of his argument stems from moral and political concerns rather than from the insights that his own analysis might generate.

While the aims behind Bad News are honourable, the essay displays a lack of imagination in terms of how a critique of the right-wing media can be carried out and to whom such a critique might potentially speak. Bad News serves ultimately to lock the conversation about media bias into an old left/right face-off which entrenches these positions as the only possible alternatives. It serves as an effective call-to-arms for Robert Manne’s regular readers to rally against the horrors of the Murdoch press, but it does less to advance our understanding of the problem or how it might be addressed. •

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