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Chapter Fifteen concerns tensions between cultural policy in the entertainment media and non-discrimination obligations in European and international economic law. As this Chapter discusses, intervention in media markets to achieve linguistic and cultural goals is a major element in European national media policy. Consequently, the EU has created European audiovisual programme content quotas and other measures that maintain relative non-discrimination between member states while also limiting public access to non-European cultural content. The Chapter also examines the mechanisms for conditional approval of state aid under EU law to national public service media for cultural purposes under the concept of 'services of general economic interest'. It then turns to the compromises of the WTO Uruguay Round, which effectively left global trade in audiovisual services outside GATS disciplines and under current Doha Round negotiations. Chapter Eight concludes by examining the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity and its relationship with multilateral and bilateral trade law.

Chapter Four sets out the European economic law framework that governs trade and investment in the media sector (excluding intellectual property rights). It explains how Europe's national media sectors were gradually brought within the European Union's rules of free movement and fair competition, including the Audiovisual Media Services Directive and the Electronic Commerce Directive. In this process, European economic law has accommodated non-market public policy goals. These include the protection of the public from harmful media content through rights of derogation that are closely linked to European human rights law. The Chapter also looks at the transition from common EU rules formulated for the highly regulated broadcast sector to new rules that address the challenges of new media services. Finally, Chapter Four looks at the application of EU competition law to the media sector, including the tension between national subsidies to public service media and the rules limiting state aid.

This chapter examines how the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) treats international trade in audiovisual services. Negotiations in the WTO have pitted proponents of a trade perspective (which holds that audiovisual services should be subject to progressive trade liberalization like any other sector) against those advocating a cultural perspective (which rejects the trade perspective because of audiovisual services’ special cultural significance). The chapter considers the politics of these trade negotiations and other settings (bilateral, regional, multilateral) and argues that the cultural sector must be supported without causing undue distortions to international trade. After tracing trade disputes in the audiovisual sector, it discusses the current international trading regime for the cultural industry and looks at the status of the film industry in Canada, Mexico, and Korea.

The regulation of the EU internal market is nothing short of an unremitting balancing exercise between conflicting interests. On the one hand lies the principle of free movement, i.e., the cornerstone of the entire internal market construct, whereby service providers lawfully operating in one Member State must enjoy unrestricted access to the markets of all the other Member States; on the other hand, there are certain aims in the general interest that simply cannot be overlooked, as they often embody politically sensitive issues of particular concern for national authorities and their constituencies. The regulation of audiovisual media services, and in particular of public service media, is no exception. Whilst market integration is the foremost concern in the framework of the Union rules applying to audiovisual media services in general, public interest considerations seem to take precedence in respect of public service media. This chapter examines how this prevalence is enshrined in legislation and is affirmed in the case law of the European Courts. The first part of the chapter examines the legal framework applying to audiovisual media services, and in particular to public service media. The second part focuses on public service media, with a view to emphasizing the specificities in the application of the rules of state aids in the field of public service media.