This being part of the Car­ni­val of Journ­al­ism (and late), ring­mas­ter Doug Fisher asks: what changes will need to be made in national and inter­na­tional legal sys­tems to help the digital age, and espe­cially journ­al­ism in the digital age, flourish?

At the risk of mak­ing myself unpop­u­lar, in our own digital realm — journ­al­ism — many of the oppor­tun­it­ies offered by digital con­tent have been held back by cross media own­er­ship restric­tions. When it comes to the media even a mogul like Rupert Mur­doch had to switch nation­al­ity to own TV sta­tions in the US.

The real legal bar­rier to the digital age is inter­na­tional gov­ernance itself. There is no inter­na­tional legis­lature estab­lished under the rep­res­ent­at­ive terms that we under­stand to con­fer legitimacy.

The digital age may offer the vir­tual prom­ise of mak­ing me a cit­izen of the world, but a Bahraini blog­ger and busi­ness­man struggles to get a visa to travel to Europe.

And without author­ity, the prin­cipal prob­lem of reg­u­la­tion is — invari­ably — enforce­ment. Cre­at­ive Com­mons may sound cheery, but try enga­ging in legal action to pro­tect your rights. That’s costly and dif­fi­cult. The US First Amend­ment may offer a con­sti­tu­tional guar­an­tee for free­dom of speech, but its writ doesn’t run here in the UK.

The real­ity of fin­an­cing legal action means that the law is avail­able only to the rich. The real­ity of enfor­cing legal action in some jur­is­dic­tions means that the law is a paper tiger.