NBTC must fulfil its constitutional task

The time has come for the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission to lift its game. The NBTC must think less about money and more about its ultimate constitutional task, to be exact. Telecom and broadcasting licences can sell, and anyone can sell them. It’s a lot trickier to make telecom and broadcasting frequencies true assets of the Thai people, as intended by the highest law of the land.

The powerful panel came into existence just a few years ago in the face of strong resistance from the politicians in power and the industry itself. Everybody – the politicians, telecom and broadcasting firms, as well as the military – feared such a national watchdog because the power to allocate and “utilise” telecom and broadcasting frequencies would be pretty much out of their hands.

Governments and men in uniform had controlled the industry, and private firms omnipresent in the industry had strong political or military connections. The NBTC was not born in the era of Thaksin Shinawatra for obvious reasons. Despite its overwhelming majority in Parliament, his Thai Rak Thai Party shunned every opportunity to fulfil one of the most important requirements of “the People’s Constitution”, or the 1997 charter. Rather than forming the constitutionally-required regulatory body, the Thaksin administration established a Ministry of Information and Communication Technology, whose role and policies were alleged to have been influenced by the fact that Thaksin himself was a telecom tycoon. But that was just half the story.

The military was not happy with the NBTC concept, either, as it held the exclusive rights to several of the broadcasting frequencies for “national security” reasons. Private broadcasting and telecom corporates, meanwhile, didn’t want to “disturb the waters”, being relatively happy with a status quo where competition was limited and cake was shared among the extremely rich and technically equipped.

The NBTC finally came to effect some changes. As expected, nobody has been happy, including new players in the industry. Complaints have been filed by digital TV operators and the recent “successful” fourth-generation (4G) telecom bidding has failed to guarantee that consumers will benefit. The bumpy start to the NBTC’s work has to do partly with the fact that the broadcasting and telecom landscapes are so huge, meaning any significant change will take time. But it is also because the NBTC’s constitutional task has not been thoroughly interpreted.

The panel can’t proclaim success based on how much money has been gained from digital TV and telecom bidding. It should not use business complaints to measure “failures” either. Ultimately, the NBTC must strive to please the consumers, and money must be secondary.

It’s a highly complicated task. On the one hand, making telecom and broadcasting frequencies “belong to the Thai people” puts the lucrative waves in the same category as bus service, waterworks and electricity. On the other hand, telecom and broadcasting management is not as simple as operating fleets of buses or laying water pipes in rural areas. The telecom and broadcasting landscapes require more money, expertise and special manpower. 

The complications are exactly why the commissioners were needed in the first place. Subjecting telecom and broadcasting frequencies to political control had proved counter-productive, and semi-monopoly had lured politicians and big corporates to work in cahoots, making corruption easier, subtle and hard to detect. It’s difficult for the NBTC to wrest control from the powers-that-be in the industry, but such a task is easy compared with the NBTC’s ultimate mission.

After a few years of trial and error, the NBTC must confront its biggest challenge now. That challenge calls for zero compromise when public benefits are concerned. It sounds daunting, but it is the only way for the NBTC to succeed where everybody else has failed.