The transition to the digital world has become “tumultuous” in this phase of the pandemic and must be “governed”, especially in view of the implementation of the NRP, underlines the president of Agcom Giacomo Lasorella in the annual report to Parliament on the activities of the ‘authority. On the one hand, explains Lasorella, there is the evolution of “technologies relating to content”, on the other “the importance of being able to take advantage of an adequate, fast and secure connection”. Starting with the future of 5G and the current fiber optic network, which reaches “33.7% of Italian households, up from 30% in 2019”.
“The Amazon experience”, taken as an example by Lasorella, has put Italians in front of a concrete experimentation of the “extraordinary moment of acceleration”. Experimentation that will continue in the coming months also with streaming football, from Serie A to the Champions League. Dazn has in fact been awarded the rights for the next three years of the championship in Italy, and Agcom has recently moved to “avoid network congestion phenomena, resulting from traffic peaks, which could occur in correspondence with the simultaneous transmission of one or more football events, and to ensure a better quality of service ».
However, there is still a lot to do. Starting from the laws that regulate the digital world: “Our legal system still lacks an organic and adequate discipline for the protection of minors applicable to online content”, Lasorella warns. And in other respects, the legislation is “fragmented”, he adds, referring in particular to the sector of copyright, the fight against gambling, the classification of audiovisual works intended for the web and video games, but also the hate speech (speeches of incitement to hatred) and to the activities of prevention and contrast of the phenomenon of cyber bullying: «Important and delicate sectors, but far from covering the entire spectrum of the Authority’s competences».
In times of pandemic, the demand for information from Italians is also growing, especially from television and the Internet. And the “new frontier of guaranteeing pluralism”, according to the Agcom president, “passes, to a large extent, through the transparency of algorithmic decisions” used by the large platforms that select and suggest content. The economic results, however, do not go hand in hand with the boom in the demand for information: “They are negative for everyone, except for online,” reports Lasorella. An effect caused by the “decline in advertising revenues due to lower spending by advertisers and the lowering of the prices of advertising spaces”. And the advertising aspect also affects the «even more marked structural crisis of the traditional press. In the second quarter of 2020, only 17.6% of Italians chose on average to get information in the newspapers, according to a downward trend that is common to the whole European Union “. But broadening our gaze, Lasorela continues, “the most evident and worrying effect is that of the weakening of the entire Italian media industry, whose economic value has been declining for over a decade”. A situation that “confirms not only the fragility of our cultural industry, but probably also signals an industrial policy vacuum to be filled”.