State unions launch bid to impeach NBTC

Good content takes back seat to making money

The State Enterprise Workers’ Relations Confederation of Thailand (SERC) plans to impeach the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) for allegedly failing to perform its duties and responsibilities.

The confederation is seeking 1,000 employees’ signatures to support the impeachment petition, which will be submitted to the Senate on Aug 6 for consideration.

Forty-four state enterprise labour unions are members of the confederation.

The broadcasting and telecoms sectors are led by the labour unions of Mcot Plc, TOT Plc and CAT telecom.

Mcot labour union president Suwit Mingmol said the NBTC has failed to perform its duties during its two-year tenure.

Mr Suwit said the independent organisation should promote good content in broadcasting, but the NBTC had focused on the digital TV spectrum auction that was concerned only with making money.

He added that while there is a regulation on reducing fees depending on the proportion of informative content, the terms of this are unclear.

Mr Suwit said the reduction in news channel content from 75% to 50% suggested the NBTC does not in fact promote good content, which goes against its purpose as defined by the constitution.

He also cited the problem of satellite and cable TV not being strictly regulated, leading to exaggerated claims being made in programmes, and the broadcast of pornographic content.

CAT Telecom’s labour union head Sangworn Pumtiem said Section 84 of the Frequency Allocation Act stipulates that TOT and CAT must return revenues from their concessions and frequency-related services to the NBTC, starting on Dec 20 this year.

Mr Sangworn said this contravenes Section 305 of the constitution, which protects state enterprise contracts and concessions from subsequent legislation.

At the same time, Mr Sangworn said the NBTC issued two regulations which clearly expressed the promotion of benefits to private telecom operators.

The regulations concerned infrastructure sharing for telecommunications and protecting mobile customers using second-generation (2G) services on the 1800-megahertz spectrum.

He said the regulations will significantly harm TOT and CAT’s finances.

Moreover, the auction of the thirdgeneration (3G) mobile service probably involved collusion between three major operators, which caused damage to the state’s telecoms enterprises and would open the door for foreign investors to dominate the telecommunications industry in Thailand, he said.