When Gavyn Davies was asked to chair an inquiry into the financing of the BBC he was said to be surprised to discover he was the only member who watched much television. This gave rise to Davies' Law. It states that those who legislate for television don't watch it and those who watch it don't legislate for it.

As the Communications Bill starts its sweaty progress through Parliament we are witnessing a grand application of Davies' Law...so foreign media giants can now take over British TV companies; Rupert Murdoch can swallow Channel 5; ITV is allowed to consummate its previously illicit union and the BBC will, after all, be tethered to Ofcom's apron strings.

Those were the headlines last week. They were all about broadcasters. But are they topics that are being hotly debated on the football terraces and in the supermarkets of Britain? I think not. Viewers' concerns are rather simpler: will the programmes they want to watch continue to be available? An impartial alien on the Clapham omnibus would conclude that we are, curiously, far more concerned about the distribution of programming than we are about the programmes themselves.

Now it would be unfair to say that the Communications Bill ignores content. I would certainly give it two cheers. It will require a "content board" to be set up within Ofcom and wants guarantees relating to news services. Sensible measures. But they are the spiritual offspring of a less enlightened system of television regulation.

Traditionally the ITC would give ITV and Channel 4 extraordinarily specific content targets (eg how many hours of religion to broadcast each week) while entirely ignoring the genuine economic issues of competition in the programme supply market. "For far too long," said the culture secretary Tessa Jowell last week, "the UK's media have been over-regulated and over-protected from competition...the draft bill will liberalise the market." Up to a point, Madame Secretary. Content is an economic issue too.

The producers' association, PACT, has recently commissioned independent economists to analyse competition in the television industry. They have concluded that there is discernable competition in the television channel market for advertising and subscription revenue. They cautiously said the same for channel distribution as between the three digital platforms (three in theory, at any rate). But in the case of programme production they reported there is only limited competition. Neither new entrants to the market nor existing independent producers enjoy equal access to programme production opportunities. In other words, in-house production teams produce the bulk of some broadcasters' programmes, apparently by right. Independent producers only exist at all by virtue of two acts of parliament in the 1980s - the establishment of Channel 4 and the introduction of the independent production quota at 25 per cent. But the quota has become a ceiling rather than a floor and the production industry remains dominated by vertically integrated, risk averse broadcasting organisations.

The economists concluded that the low likelihood of in-house production losing business to independents reduces some broadcasters' incentives to invest, innovate or increase efficiency. These factors ultimately result in a loss of value to UK television consumers. PACT has argued that the new bill should enshrine a code of practice to be enforced by Ofcom. This would ensure equal access to programme-making opportunities with all broadcasters. The BBC would need to demonstrate, much as ITV's Network Centre was meant to, that in-house producers have no unspoken guarantees. Such a rule would enhance the BBC's key role as a funder and distributor of content. All owners of spectrum would need to demonstrate a clear, genuine separation between commissioning and production. Real competition, for the first time ever, would increase investment in the creative economy and encourage more small companies to spring up. Broadcasters, meanwhile, would develop a habit of commissioning only the best ideas from the best producers.

There are those who reacted to the Bill with dire warnings about allowing more foreign ownership of our media. We'll drown in a welter of imported Buffy look-alikes. I don't agree. The establishment of a competitive and plural creative economy is a far more important issue.

As the Communications Bill is scrutinized and amended this year I would like to think that some of our elected legislators are prepared to disprove Davies' Law and start arguing from a programming perspective.

There is a nice irony here - traditional broadcasters fear the growing power of the digital platform owners and when analogue TV ends, want competition law to ensure that they all have equal access to digital platforms on fair terms of trade.

This is, in effect, the same argument that indie producers are making about access to broadcasters. We agree.

Peter Bazalgette is chairman of Endemol UK and a non-executive director of Channel 4

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