Two bills for 'digital economy' scheme to be promptly revised before third reading by NLA
The Digital Economy Bill and Personal Data Protection Bill will be quickly revised before undergoing a third reading by the National Legislative Assembly, Information and Communication Technology Minister Uttama Savanayana said yesterday.
"There are some parts of the bills that need to be adjusted and improved," he said.
There are a total of eight bills pending aimed at enabling the current government’s quest for a "digital economy". Uttama said six of them would be put on hold until the Digital Economy and Personal Data Protection bills are passed by the NLA and become law.
The ICT Ministry has initiated projects to drive the digital-economy policy with six objectives: promoting small and medium-sized enterprises, especially e-tourism and start-ups; promoting a "digital society"; promoting digital government; developing hard infrastructure; promoting smart cities; and promoting a digital workforce.
"We will pilot a smart city, which will consist of a smart economy, smart transport, smart environment, smart people, smart living, and smart governance. Phuket is a possible candidate for the pilot case," Uttama said.
He said there would be projects to encourage SMEs to go online and conduct e-commerce, and to use Thai software to improve their competitiveness.
The ICT Ministry will collaborate with other organisations to launch Thaiemarket.com as an online marketplace for Thai businesses connected to the Asean Economic Community. It aims to get more than 200 SMEs to establish their own e-commerce websites in the initial stage of the project.
The government will also encourage enterprises to transform to the digital economy by educating them on online business.
Another plan aims to get 1,200 local communities to go online – again in the initial stage, though the ministry was vague about time frames.
The ministry hopes to develop a "Thailand Tourism Open Platform" to help tourism businesses explore the markets.
Uttama said start-ups were also a key area that the government will emphasise. It will support and promote an ecosystem of tech start-ups with the aim of increasing their numbers and the digital workforce.
He said this could be done through incubation programmes, accelerator programmes, contests and conferences. It plans to promote start-up champions to attract investors.
This scheme aims for an investment value for tech start-ups of Bt3 billion by the third year.
Moreover, the ICT Ministry will continue to promote a nationwide broadband network as a hard-infrastructure pillar of the digital-economy plan, with the goal of establishing thousands of fibre-optic connections to schools, hospitals and local administrations.
"These are examples of the actual projects in the plans. In order to run these projects without needing to wait for the Digital Economy Bill to be passed, we will utilise the tablet budget of Bt3.755 billion to support these projects," Uttama said, referring to a now-defunct programme to provide free tablet computers to school pupils.
