POPULAR video blogs will be subject to new European regulations if Brussels’s proposals to update television regulation are adopted by Europe’s member states.

The threat — confirmed by European officials yesterday — has prompted Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, to say that the Commission plans are misguided.

The Commission said that “blogs could be caught” by the new rules if they “had a commercial purpose, where video was the main element”. A blog also has to be popular enough to count as “mass media”.

That could encompass any successful video blog that takes advertising. Many bloggers try to earn extra money by hosting adverts, supplied by Google or another internet broker, and the number of sites caught by the proposed rules is likely to be substantial.

The European Commission wants to update the 17-year-old Television Without Frontiers Directive and include for the first time rules to govern “non-linear audio visual services” — video on demand and internet broadcasting.

The proposed rules for new media are intended to be light-touch, but would require commercial video bloggers and other video website owners to respect rules governing incite- ment to hatred and child protection. Ofcom, though, said that bringing video blogs into a regulatory net originally designed for traditional television broadcasters was excessive. Both the UK regulator and British ministers believe that Europe’s plans should not include internet content in their scope.

A spokesman for Ofcom said: “We would be concerned if direct statutory regulation was applied to internet content, which in no way resembles broadcast television. We have consistently said that selfregulation should be considered as a first option.”

Next week James Purnell, the Broadcasting Minister, plans to lobby his counterparts in Germany and other member states in an attempt to convince them to help him to force amendments to the Commission’s draft directive.

Ministers are broadly concerned that the proposed rules are unduly bureaucratic, may be out-dated before they bed in and fail to make distinctions, such as between broadcast and downloaded content. Google joined the dissenters, saying: “We believe that extending the scope of broadcasting regulation to new media like the internet would be a mistake.”

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