CANBERRA (Reuters) ? A review of Australia's media will call for a radical overhaul of laws that curb the influence of media proprietors, potentially paving the way for more consolidation between newspapers, internet and television, reports said on Thursday.
Australian media is already among the world's most concentrated, with Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd controlling some 70 percent of the country's newspaper ownership. Previous attempts to ease ownership laws have drawn criticism that they will threaten democratic protections.
But an interim report by the government-backed review into media convergence said long-standing cross-ownership rules were irrelevant in the online era, as media companies increasingly operate across several platforms, the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper said.
"The media laws in Australia were largely put in place 20 years ago, and this is an opportunity to bring them up to date with all the technological change we've seen," review chairman Glen Boreham told the newspaper.
Instead of cross-media ownership rules, the report will call for all big media mergers to be subject to an overarching "public interest" test, the paper said.
The laws, last changed in 2006, prevent the common ownership of newspapers, television and radio broadcasting licenses that serve the same market with a "two-in-three" rule.
They also restrict foreign ownership to allow single foreign shareholders to only hold up to 25 percent of the shares in a mass circulation newspaper, with a maximum of 30 percent for all foreign interests.
The convergence review proposed removal of two in three rule that limits operators such as New Corp from buying other media interests, The Australian Financial Review newspaper said.
It would also aid media mogul Kerry Stokes and his Seven West Media, while putting new media like Google and Facebook on the same footing, the paper said.
"Existing media ownership rules are becoming increasingly ineffective," the report said, according to the Herald. "In particular, the cross-media rule that prevents a person from controlling more than two out of three traditional local media in a license area is less relevant as many of these now operate on a range of platforms."
Other laws that could be changed included a "one to a market rule" for commercial television and a "two to market" rule for commercial radio.
Those rules stop the same person controlling more than one commercial TV broadcasting license or more than two commercial radio licenses in the same license area, usually in Australia's major cities like Sydney and Melbourne.
To enforce the still-undefined public interest test, the convergence review recommended a new independent regulator to also resolve consumer complaints, the Herald said.
The convergence review, which is separate from a government inquiry into the print media launched in the wake of the News Corp phone hacking scandal in the United Kingdom, is due to hand its final report to the government in March.
The Australian entertainment and media industry is forecast to grow 28 percent over the next five years, largely due to growth in interactive gaming, internet access and subscription television, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers outlook.
(Reporting by Rob Taylor; Editing by Lincoln Feast)
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