The Trans Atlantic Dialogue on Broadcasting and the Information Society is an informal group of about eighty senior executives from private industry and officials from Europe and North America who try to create greater understanding of communications policy issues.
Our first activities, in 1988, concerned the European Broadcasting Directive. And since then we have two main areas of interest: the challenges of the Information Society and freedom of expression in the former Communist countries .
After the winter of 1989. with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the revolutions of Eastern Europe, TADoBatIS sent missions throughout Eastern and Central Europe, the Balkans and Russia and Ukraine to help to draft new laws about broadcasting and to establish regulatory bodies and independence for both the public and the private sectors.
Now, most of the work of TADoBatIS is on the European and American communications policy issues of the Information Society.
In 1995 after a successful special meeting, supported by the US Department of Commerce, the European Commission and private industry, TADoBatIS produced the Waterloo Report on these problems. This initiative was well received, so with the support of the private sector, the European Commission and the Governments of the United States and Ireland a follow up meeting – on the theme of Convergence-was held at the Foreign Office in Dublin in 1996 at the invitation of the Government of Ireland, which was then in the Presidency of the European Union. As well as broadcasters and telecoms people, companies such as Microsoft were included and there was also senior representation from the European Commission, the European Parliament, the White House and the Office of the Prime Minister of France.
In 1997 the Government of the Netherlands were in the European Union Presidency and they invited us to meet at the Foreign Office in The Hague. The mix of participants included people from the Pentagon and the US Department of Justice and the Commerce Department, Members of the European Parliament, the Commission of the EU and representatives of major private companies. The theme of this meeting was” Criminality and Control in the Digital Age”.
In 1998, with the encouragement of EU Commissioner van den Broek, we were invited by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Senate to meet in Prague in the Senate chamber, September 18-20. Issues of the Information Society discussed included copyright and piracy, content regulation, encryption, privacy, broadcast regulation and competition policy, with the added focus of Eastern and Central Europe.
We were invited by the Foreign Office of Finland to hold our 1999 meeting from June 4-6 in Helsinki as part of Finland’s build up to their Presidency of the European Union. This was a very successful meeting (Finland being in the forefront of the developments of the Information Society ) and there was a penetrating discussion of communications policies and possibilities in Kosovo and the Balkans. We held a small special meeting to concentrate on these Balkan issues in Barcelona on November 3 1999 in association with the larger News World Conference.
In June 2000 from 9 to 11, we met in Paris, prior to the French Presidency of the European Union at the invitation of the Foreign Minister of France, Hubert Vedrine. We will be in Stockholm on 6 and 7 July 2001 in the Rotunda of the Office of the Prime Minister.
Our meetings are limited to about forty people around the table and attendance is by invitation only. They pay their own way. No person speaks for more than five minutes
