The United States And The European Union’s Regulatory Convergence Practices And Experiences To China

The rapid development of information technology, network technology, has made an unprecedented industrial revolution in the telecommunications industry and the media industry. Under this revolution, the industry boundary is becoming vanished, and the industrial structure and market structure also changed a lot. So as to traditional regulation has encountered huge challenge in the integration times.In response to the industrial convergence, countries around the world are competing to promote regulatory convergence practices. The United States and the European Union’s regulatory convergence practices are the most successful. The United States has its own characteristics. In adhering to classification regulation tradition, it has established a regulatory framework through classifying the information services. The EU’s regulatory convergence is also distinctive, which has built a new regulatory model over the telecommunications industry and the media industry:On one hand, it build a unified electronic communications framework; On the other hand, it formed a unified regulatory in the content. Though the U.S.and the EU’s regulatory models are different, they still have commons:First, regulation ways are through building a layered regulatory framework to achieve the regulatory convergence. Second, regulation goals are promoting competition.Countries’regulation is closely related to national political system, economic system and cultural traditions. Even the United States and the European Union have mature market economies, they are still different from each other in the path of the regulatory convergence. China’s regulatory reform has its specific goals, the goal of the media regulation is to maintain the national ideological security, and the telecommunications regulation must prioritize to safety of the industry’s development. In the era of convergence, China’s regulatory reform needs to shoulder three basic tasks:the one is to complete a transformation from administration manage to government regulation; another one is to realize a change from industry regulation to competition regulation; the last one is achieve a change from tradition industry regulation to convergence regulation. These reasons determine the U.S. and the E.U’s implications to China. However, the United States and the European Union’s regulatory convergence have underlined the law of industry development. Based on the successful regulatory convergence experiences of the U.S and the EU, China’s regulatory convergence reform can adhere to the following ideas: firstly, developing the market and promoting competition; secondly, implementing the separation regulation in the contents and the network transmission; thirdly, carrying out the classification regulation to the content; fourthly, building a unified regulatory body.