My Lords, I am delighted to hear that the Government are looking at this. I do not know whether this is going to be the long awaited White Paper coming out at the end of July—again, I will put my party clothes on if this is the case, since we have been waiting 18 months for this. If it includes consideration of Section 73, so much the better.
I am glad that although the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, disagrees with me, he thinks that there are legitimate concerns. However, this is not a matter of depriving 4 million consumers of the ability to see public service broadcasting over various digital media, because that is already covered by Section 272 of the Communications Act 2003. I hope that there is not going to be a knee-jerk reaction to Section 73 going and that people very carefully consider what Section 272 actually sets out; basically, it gives the right—and Ofcom enforces it—for Virgin, Sky and so on to show these public service broadcast channels over their own platforms.
I have not raised the whole issue of whether or not we adopt a US-style system with regard to the balance of trade between satellite and public service broadcasters and so on. That was not my intention at all. My intention was to draw attention to what, really, is cheating—we were talking earlier about cheating—by services such as TVCatchup, which has no commercial arrangements with the public service broadcasters. It inserts its own advertising in the breaks of commercial broadcasting. It is taking advantage of other people’s content. It is not paying for it. It does not feed back into the public service broadcasters in any shape or form. If one puts a TVCatchup app on an iPad or another tablet, there is no obligation to pay the BBC licence fee, so nobody is deriving any benefit from the services it provides other than TVCatchup itself. This why our public service broadcasters are so concerned and wish to see action on this. I very much hope that, come July, our honourable friend Mr Vaizey will take cognisance of a serious gap through which TVCatchup is driving a coach and horses. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.