Professor Hitchens, writing from Australia, sees a dramatically different regulatory framework in a post-convergence Broadband Age. Future media policy and regulation, she says, will have to address the entire media ecosystem, viewed as a regulatory space in which self-regulation and the market are all part of the basket of regulatory tools. Its goal should be to maintain and strengthen the public sphere. Traditional rules limiting media ownership or setting content requirements are unlikely to be viable, and will be replaced by increased reliance on sectoral ex ante competition regulation, perhaps complemented by a code of behavior promoting self-regulation regarding content. Hitchens concludes that traditional media regulations rooted in spectrum scarcity are not sustainable in the long term
