As Sean Plunket and his backers vow to fight the BSA, calls are growing to either build a super-regulator for the online age or abolish the agency entirely, writes Catherine McGregor in today’s extract from The Bulletin.

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A system under strain

The government appears poised to revisit long-shelved reforms to media regulation as a political storm gathers around the Broadcasting Standards Authority. The row began when the BSA, traditionally a watchdog for TV and radio only, asserted jurisdiction over online talk network The Platform, prompting an eruption from its founder, Sean Plunket, and allies including David Seymour and Winston Peters, who accused the authority of “Soviet-era stasi” censorship.

Media minister Paul Goldsmith has suggested the agency may have a point. “It’s not obvious to me why one group of people who are broadcasting in a very similar way should be subject to the BSA and another group shouldn’t be,” he told Stuff’s Lloyd Burr, hinting that online-only stations such as The Platform and Reality Check Radio could soon be covered.

Goldsmith said officials are considering a redesign of the system, potentially resurrecting parts of the Safer Online Services and Media Platforms review – shelved by this government after running for five years – to create a one-stop-shop regulator for all kinds of broadcast media. However Burr writes that Goldsmith is also considering other options, “including merging the Media Council and BSA’s roles, and even scrapping the BSA altogether”.

Scrap it, says Act

The latter option already has its supporters among the coalition. As Stewart Sowman-Lund reported in The Post last week, Act MP Todd Stephenson is considering submitting a private member’s bill to abolish the authority entirely. In a letter to Goldsmith, Stephenson said it was time to “reconsider whether the BSA continues to serve a useful role”, later telling The Post its attempt to oversee the internet showed the agency’s mission had become “impossible”. If the BSA were to go, “existing legal remedies” would be sufficient to address any genuine harms, he said.

For Act, scrapping the BSA fits with its broader ambition to shrink the state and reduce costs to taxpayers. “We think this is just another example of an entity that probably isn’t needed anymore,” Stephenson said – a position that could leave the coalition divided over whether to expand or erase the broadcasting watchdog.

The ‘broadcast’ conundrum

At the heart of the controversy lies an exceedingly tricky question: what counts as “broadcasting” in an age of livestreams, podcasts and TikToks? Explaining why it felt justified in taking up a complaint against The Platform, the BSA argued that “online broadcasters that resemble traditional TV or radio stations clearly fall within the scope of the [Broadcasting] Act”. But David Harvey, a retired judge and commentator on media law, told The Post that such a broad interpretation risks absurd results: “What happens if I decide that I’m going to run a livestream of me working, and people can phone in and say, ‘What are you working on?’ Arguably, it could amount to a broadcast.” The BSA’s Stacey Wood pushed back: “We do not believe individuals livestreaming via their social media accounts can be considered broadcasters as defined by the Act.”

Double standards galore

For The Spinoff’s Duncan Greive, the uproar over The Platform is a symptom of something larger: the “ludicrous” double standards that have grown out of a regulatory system built for another era. It’s not just about defining “broadcasting”, he says. For example, “Advertising on television and radio is heavily scrutinised, but scam ads on Facebook regularly lead to huge losses, with no consequences to its multi-trillion-dollar owner.” The BSA’s reach may be limited, but its recent move has forced politicians to confront an uncomfortable truth: that the system for regulating media no longer makes sense.

The solutions, Greive argues, are starkly binary: either build a UK-style super-regulator to oversee all media, or dismantle the current regime entirely. It’s an extreme choice, but perhaps, he suggests, “the most honest acknowledgement of what is increasingly unavoidably clear: on the internet, you’re on your own.”