ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that policy knowledge about the fundamentals of human communication structures and processes, developed through decades and across waves of infrastructural, content and service-based changes in media technologies, are relevant experience repositories and knowledge tool kits for European media policy in the twenty-first century. The European media environment derives its character from a set of heterogeneous political and economic structures, languages and cultures, and social and education systems. The media convergence issues, the continued role and position of public regulatory intervention in media policy, policy issues arising from the development of electronic communication network environments and lessons for European media policy from cases beyond the EU form the core themes. The politico-legal nature of the European Union (EU) and its potential influences on policy-making aside, a fourth major influence on media policy has been the uneasy relationship between the EU's penchant for taking measures with an industrial policy character and, by contrast, those bearing a neo-liberal market character.
