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On 8 January 2015, the College van Beroep voor het bedrijfsleven (CBb), a Dutch court of last instance for certain administrative matters, gave its partial decision in a case concerning the renewal fees for commercial radio broadcasting licences. It found that the calculation method applied to determine this fee was unsuitable for one of the licences and that, as a consequence, the charge levied for that licence was too high. The Dutch Telecommunications Act (Telecommunicatiewet) contains rules on the allocation of radio broadcasting frequencies. Those frequencies intended for commercial use can...

On 23 December 2014, the Court of Appeal in Amsterdam ruled in favour of the Dutch broadcast company Powned in a dispute regarding a board member of Buma/Stemra, the Dutch collective rights management society for musical works. This decision affirms the decision of the District Court of Amsterdam. Powned had published on its website and in its television news programme that Gerrits, board member of Buma/Stemra, was “corrupt”. Powned based this allegation on a phone call between Gerrits and an agent of a composer. In this phone call, which Powned secretly recorded, Gerrits offered to use his influential...

Reporting on the developments within the media sector and more specifically the levels of media concentration in Flanders is one of the tasks that is assigned to the Flemish Media Regulator (Vlaamse Regulator voor de Media) by the Flemish Media Decree. The extensive 2014 report emphasises that it is increasingly difficult to undertake this task, as trends towards cross-media ownership and convergence proliferate. Flemish media groups are more and more intertwined and enter into alternating alliances in their quest to strengthen their position across various media. In addition, vertical concentration...

On 12 November 2014 the Dutch Media Authority (Commissariaat van de Media) published its yearly research report on the Dutch media, the Mediamonitor (for previous reports, see IRIS 2011-5/35 and IRIS 2006-1/33). The report discusses the Dutch media landscape. This year’s report pays special attention to diversity in the field of television, in order to evaluate the new Dutch must-carry rules. As of 1 January 2014, a new law has been implemented changing the Dutch must-carry rules (see IRIS 2013-7/22). Under the old rules, cable operators were advised by boards of consumers (programmaraden) on what...

On 13 October 2014, the State Secretary for Education, Culture and Science wrote a 25-page letter to the House of Representatives reporting the cabinet’s plans to strengthen the Dutch public television broadcasting system. The public broadcasting system has been the object of large budget cuts since 2013 and will have to merge from 21 to eight public broadcasting organisations before 2016. According to the state secretary, the public broadcaster has to produce more innovative and distinctive television programmes to be able to stay relevant in a changing media landscape. In his letter, the state...