Media legislation
Deregulation is a major issue in the Dutch media policy. An important change in the last year was that the limit on the market share of newspapers has been removed. This issue is now handled on an individual basis by the Autoriteit Consument en Markt (ACM), which saw for instance no problem in De Persgroep growing to a market share of more than 50 percent. In some cases, in the past, ACM required the sale of some titles or forbid the closure of competing editions.
In the last years, national and regional public broadcasters have been confronted by budget cuts and ‘forced’ mergers (non-cooperation led to extra budget cuts). Most national broadcast organizations merged with a former competitor: regional broadcasters are now grouped together and closer to the national public broadcasting organization NPO.