NBTC puts the brakes on order to require OTT registration

The board of the National Broadcasting and Telecommunica-tion Commission (NBTC) yesterday decided that its subcommittee |on OTT would draft new rules on OTT within 30 days, NBTC secretary-general Takorn Tantasith said after the board’s meeting.
He said the NBTC would require registration for OTT providers again once the new rules come into effective.
With the annulment of the pre-vious order by the NBTC’s broadcasting subcommittee, the July 22 deadline for OTT platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Netflix to register with the regulator no longer applies, according to Takorn.
The OTT rules are expected to become law in the next 90 days. 
Following the NBTC’s working process – after the OTT sub-panel finishes drawing up the OTT rules within 30 days for the NBTC board’s consideration – it will put the draft up for public hearings, to be completed in 60 days. Then the NBTC board will convene to approve the final draft and have it published in the Royal Gazette. 
OTT refers to the delivery of content, such as films and TV programmes over the Internet, either free or for a charge, bypassing traditional distribution.
The NBTC board resolution states that OTT operators must operate under Thai law, including the broadcasting law, which empowers the NBTC to regulate the broadcasting and telecom sectors. It is the NBTC’s duty to prescribe rules to regulate it. 

Detrimental to Thailand
The NBTC process in drawing the rules up must be made in compliance with the related legal process or it will be criticised in the future. As per its rule development process, the NBTC has to allow public hearings of the draft rules and analyse its impact on the public, especially the impact on the economy and the country’s revenue.
Last week the Asia Internet Coalition (AIC) wrote a letter to the NBTC, warning that the commission’s move to regulate OTT business could be detrimental to Thailand, stoke business uncertainty, slow economic growth and dampen investment in the country’s growing digital industry. 
The AIC said it welcomed constructive engagement with Thai authorities on the regulations. However, the commission has not made any of its draft regulations public. 
The AIC is an industry association promoting understanding and resolutions on Internet policy issues in the Asia-Pacific region, with tech giants like Facebook, Google, Twitter and Yahoo among its members.
The sub-panel called on major OTT network platforms to register with it for the first time on June 22 as part of its attempt to regulateOTT providers. Once registered, they would have been immediately permitted to operate their business under the broadcasting law. 
On that day the sub-panel set the first OTT group a July 22 deadline to register with the NBTC or face the risk of hindered business operations. 
On June 22, YouTube, Facebook and Netflix failed to register with the NBTC, though Netflix informed the panel that it would meet with it on the matter early in July.
The sub-panel said that if the July 22 deadline were ignored, the NBTC would inform the embassies of the countries involved that these OTT platforms had failed to comply with the relevant law.