Peter Jay criticises the current overregulation of broadcasting and outlines a possible future organisation for what he prefers to describe as ‘electronic publishing’: his assumption is that the problem of ‘spectrum scarcity’, which provided the original rationale for regulation, has been overcome. ‘Within less than two decades,’ he argues, we will inhabit ‘a world in which there will be no technically based grounds for government interference in electronic publishing.’

Jay sets out his vision. Every household will be connected by an interactive fibre optic link which allows ‘the nation's viewers’ to ‘simultaneously watch as many different programmes as the nation's readers can read different books, magazines and newspapers’. The television becomes like a telephone. Viewers dial to select programmes, a meter monitors quantity and kind of programmes selected and the television set is connected to a ‘central black box’ which is fed with ‘an indefinitely large number of programmes’ and which is maintained by British Telecom. Consumers buy programmes on a pay-to-view basis.

Jay believes this future form of electronic publishing will encapsulate and reflect in its structures, the principles of consumer sovereignty, freedom and choice. It requires no regulatory laws other than the general provisions for libel, copyright and obscenity, which already govern publishing. The state may wish to continue ‘to subsidise any particular categories of electronic publishing which are considered virtuous or in the public interest’.