The growth of digital media may provide lots of new content but also has led to many new policy debates.

As we move toward a multi-screen world, there are four broad principles, which allow service providers to be partners with regulators, content owners and consumers. These are: 

* Service providers cannot be expected to monitor specific content flowing across their networks without prior consent and knowledge.

* Content creators should continue to have a right to be paid a reasonable sum for their work but should not expect that fee to continue forever.

* Content creators should have a reasonable expectation that their work will not be substantially reproduced without compensation.

* End consumers should expect to be able to move content from one device to another without paying exorbitant fees. 

What makes the scenario so far from reality is that every movement of digital content is supposed to be governed by agreements between owners and distributors. But as evidenced by the rise of Napster in the late 1990s and a slew of peer-to-peer applications more recently, those agreements often are ignored. 

Perhaps more important than broad network architecture concerns is the advancement of digital technology. These advancements give consumers unbound freedom to view content or simply take bits of professional content, mash it up with other content, perhaps add a new music or audio track and then maybe even claim ownership over it. The more nefarious consumers have used the advancement of digitization to outright steal content.

Service providers have responded by deploying new technology including content delivery networks, fiber-in-the-access network and distributed storage. Each causes a multitude of policy debates. 

In the CDN environment, the issue is whether to build an internal CDN or purchase services from an existing provider - which leads to regulatory issues, as well. 

The same can be said for data storage networks, which become increasingly important with the development of video-based convergence services. In the fiber access market, regulation and government policy are becoming dominant factors in determining when and where service providers build.

The digitization of content has been one of the fundamental shifts in the last decade. And because media, in particular video content, can be so easily digitized, it will continue to create new behaviors, expectations and most importantly, the need for new policies that govern the movement of content.