Should website editorial content be regulated? Anyway, in practice, can it be regulated? Will digital users have greater confidence in websites that are regulated and therefore gravitate towards them? Or, as the net becomes the leading medium of choice for all news-readers, will it gradually end of Britain's lengthy experiments with press self-regulation?
All of those questions come to mind in reading the speech made last night by the Press Complaints Commission chairman Sir Christopher Meyer. His address to delegates of Europe's press councils underlined his belief that "the march of technology into the digital age does not weaken" the view that self-regulation remains an "appropriate answer to the question of how to enhance the quality of journalism in a free society."
Here is Meyer's case. While conceding that "information is now an international commodity" and that national governments cannot "ring-fence their own jurisdiction and expect to be able to impose rules on what can be reported", he believes that self-regulation can achieve a sensible control over content to maintain "standards".
He said: "It will be essential, in an environment where people are bombarded with information through countless different channels, for consumers to be able to distinguish between the products available - what is reliable, and what is rubbish.
"The industry's own action in drawing up a set of agreed rules for journalists, and then tasking an outside body with enforcing them, is precisely the sort of corporate responsibility that should help maintain and enhance trust in the press."
I certainly agree with him that trust is the key. Website traffic volumes suggest that people do choose trustworthy news outlets on the net. In the States, the New York Times heads the list of most popular news sites while, in Britain, the BBC takes top spot. (And, yes, The Guardian is the most popular of newspaper websites).
That shouldn't blind us to the fact that hundreds of thousands of people regularly log on to sites - such as Matt Drudge or Guido Fawkes for example - that draw their strength from being unregulated. All citizen journalism sites are also likely to avoid voluntarily subjecting themselves to control by any kind of regulator.
It is possible to argue that such sites are, at best, complementary to the trusted purveyors of news, so most people most of the time will prefer news outlets they can trust. Here's Meyer: "In an environment where people are bombarded with information through countless different channels, [it is essential] for consumers to be able to distinguish between the products available - what is reliable, and what is rubbish."
He believes that by having agreed a set of rules - the editors' code of practice - and given power to the PCC to enforce them, press owners and editors encourage a trust in their output. Accordingly, said Meyer, "self-regulation has more significance now than ever... the big idea inherent in self-regulation - that self-imposed rules are more effective and more philosophically desirable than legal ones - has obvious relevance to today's media environment where anyone can be a publisher and national legal boundaries are meaningless."
But, of course, the very fact that anyone can be a publisher and transmit content across frontiers is the very reason that regulation of any kind becomes much more problematic. Is it not feasible that publishers who will have nothing to do with self-regulation will win audience trust regardless? Meyer believes that a strong and trustworthy form of self-regulation will lure new media operators into its orbit because it will offer their users a guarantee that they are behaving well.
That's why he places so much emphasis on British newspaper websites showing some kind of PCC kitemark. In an ideal world this would become a byword for trust. He said: "What bemuses me sometimes is when newspapers, magazines and their websites are shy about telling their readers about this virtue. When media generally are clamouring to demonstrate that they can be trusted, their subscription to an independent professional standards body should be the most important tool in the box."
Meyer's viewpoint is an entirely logical extension of the argument that led to the formation of self-regulation in Britain. But it clashes with the deeply held belief in freedom of speech in the United States. Most importantly, it appears to clash with the freedom espoused by internet pioneers.
The Meyer speech forces us to ask what might happen without any regulation whatsoever. Trust is a two-way street. Do we trust people to make up their own minds about which news outlets to trust? Or do we need self-regulation in order to point them towards trustworthy sites?
