Hello, we're back again, sliding into your feed with another week of regulatory news from around the world.

My name is James Panicki. I'm an MLEX editor with our Asia-Pacific team, and it's great to have

your company again today on the M-Lex podcast. In just under 10 minutes from now, we'll be having a chat

with our Southeast Asia correspondent, Jet DeMaso Santos, who recently sat down with a senior

official from the Philippines National Privacy Commission. What emerged from that encounter offers a fascinating insight into penalties, deterrence and

the prospect of court challenges.

First up, though, let me put something to you.

When was the last time that you asked a smart speaker to connect you to your favourite radio station.

And what's your relationship with your smart television set and how it presents you with

programming?

This very conversation is now underway in Australia where commercial radio broadcasters are

concerned that big tech, whether through Amazon's Echo, Apple's Siri or Google's assistant,

is fast becoming an intermediary between the listener and the station.

Now, is that a problem?

Well, it certainly could become one.

It's all about the path that the speaker might choose to take you down when directing you to content,

the data it may want to collect

along the way, and the antitrust concerns that underpin the speaker's operations, which are

very much Emlex's bread and butter. This discussion has ushered in the next phase of Australia's

arguably revolutionary approach to a media code,

a media code that has forced, or at least has threatened to force,

both Facebook and Google, to pay for the news content they use.

...