|
Vol. XXV
No. 36
September 09,2001 |
People’s
Bill 2000 Or A Con Job On The People!
Prabir Purkayastha
THE Convergence
Bill 2000 placed before the Parliament is based on the hype that information technology
(IT), telecommunications and entertainment industry are merging together. This completely
obscures what is converging in the above areas and what is not. The convergence in
communications, IT and entertainment is in technology the infrastructure, the type
of equipment used and in methods i.e., digitisation of voice, data sound and pictures. The
services over such networks remain distinct and there is little likelihood of their
convergence. This becomes clearer if we look at telecommunications and entertainment. The
existing cable television network can deliver telephone, Internet and cable television;
however only a fool will argue that talking on telephone is converging with watching
television. The Convergence Bill however believes that as the infrastructure and
technology for telecommunications, IT and entertainment are becoming similar,
entertainment and communications services are also converging. The entire philosophy
underlying the Convergence Bill is based on this faulty and foolish premise.
PROVISIONS OF
THE BILL
The Bill seeks
to replace the Telegraph Act of 1985, the Indian Wireless Act of 1933, the Telegraph Wire
Unlawful Possession Act of 1950 and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) Act
of 1997. The Prashar Bharati Act is not covered under the Bill. It seeks to provide powers
to a Communications Commission of India that will license all communications and
entertainment companies which use wireless, wired or network infrastructure. The print
media is excluded from the ambit of the Commissions. The Commission will not only license
and regulate these entities, it will also “formulate and lay down programme and
advertising codes” and “take steps to regulate or curtail the harmful and
illegal content on the internet and other communications services”. In other words,
it will regulate not only the physical infrastructure but also the content in the
electronic media. Under the provision 23 of the Bill, the government can give the
Commission directives from time to time on policy matters, which will be binding on the
commission. The Act also enables the government to tap any communications email,
telephone, cellular, etc., without any judicial procedure. There is also an Appellate body
under the proposed Bill — the Communications Appellate Tribunal — that will hear appeals
against the decisions of the Commission. The decisions of the Tribunal can only be
challenged before the Supreme Court and not before a High Court.
UNDERLYING
PHILOSOPHY
The interesting
part of the proposed Bill is not only what it contains, but also what it does not. The
Bill hardly addresses issues of public interest such as universal access, public address
broadcasting, protecting against cross-media monopolies, etc; there is little or no
attempt identify the needs of the people and their interests. Instead, the Bills
focuses almost entirely on how to allow private players in various markets, protect them
against “the dominant player” and see that they make profits. The only other
area the Bill addresses is to set up a censoring agency that will carry out government
directives. Such directives could include no criticism of defence services or of the
police as it will weaken “the territorial integrity of the country”, one of the
objectives of the Bill. In a discussion in All India Radio on the Bill, the anchor
strongly argued on the need to control the media on issues such as Tehalka and Kashmir, as
they weaken the nation. As long as corporate interests are protected and the government
kept immune from criticism, the BJP led NDA government does not care what happens to rural
telephony, taking telecommunications to all parts of the country and any other matter of
public concern. A muzzled media making huge profits fits in with the ideology of the BJP;
a police state for the capitalist class, this is the underlying philosophy of the Bill.
The misplaced
focus of the Convergence Bill can be seen from its primary focus on competition.
Presumably, the private operators in basic services, who have provided only three lakh
telephones after three years of receiving their licenses, need to be protected against
BSNL and MTNL that have provided in the same period, connections to two crore consumers.
Obviously, the private operators are only interested in a minuscule section that can pay
large amounts. In this context, the protection of private operators from BSNL or MTNL,
which the Bill believes is its primary function, is ridiculous.
Any regulatory
regime draws its need from public interest or larger social objectives. Unless there are
such public interest issues, there is no need for regulation. The social objectives in
telecom and broadcasting are providing universal access at low costs to the people. The
broadcasters, apart from low cost viewing, have also to promote healthy, democratic
culture, plurality of views and protect against harmful content. As telecommunications are
largely private, the public interest lies in protecting the privacy of such
communications. The regulatory needs of broadcasting and telecommunications are common in
so far as there is a need to extend such services at low costs to the people. The purposes
of regulation in terms of content are completely different for broadcasting and
telecommunications. In one case, it is public and therefore subject to regulation not to
cause harm, for example to minors, prevents monopolies; in the case of telecommunications,
regulation is to maintain privacy of the communication. Therefore, the question that
arises is should there be a common regulatory approach at all?
BROAD CONSENSUS
A number of
countries have addressed the convergence issue. The broad consensus that is emerging is
that while there is technological convergence, the type of services being offered is quite
different. Thus, the two broad areas: audio-visual (or broadcasting) and
telecommunications areas need different regulatory forms: broadcasting and
telecommunications should be retained as separate regulatory regimes. The common
infrastructure that may be used may need the two sets of regulators to work together but
do not need a common regulator. The European Union (EU) produced a Green Paper on this in
1997 discussing various aspects of convergence; it had wide ranging public discussions on
this and has finally agreed that there is no need for a common regulator. In the US, the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) only deals with the physical infrastructure and
not with content of broadcasting. The only country in the world that has passed a
Convergence Act is Malaysia and their experience has not been happy.
REGULATORY
PROBLEMS
The Indian
scenario is further compounded by the problem of repeated regulatory instability. The
Telecom Regulator TRAI came into existence only in 1997. The Act had to be
amended in 1999 as TRAI and Department of Telecom entered into serious turf wars. No
sooner has the regulatory scene assumed any degree of stability, we now have a new
Convergence Bill. If it passes and becomes an Act, it is likely to see a number of legal
challenges, throwing the regulatory regime into a further state of flux. What passes all
understanding is why is there a need for an Act that no one has asked for. The cellular
telecom operators are unhappy with the TRAI; this cannot be a reason to throw out the TRAI
Act, unless the motive is to throw out the current set of regulators while constituting
the new Communications Commission. It is possible that the operators have such narrow
interests. But why should the government contemplate a change when the current telecom
policy regime the NTP 99 has been introduced only in 1999? Or are we to
conclude that the Group on Telecom that produced the NTP 99 botched up the job so
completely that it did not even address such basic questions as convergence?
The Internet
related services are even more problematic. Currently, only Internet service providers are
licensed and that also very lightly. The rates, quality standards, content have all been
left outside the purview of any regulation. Of course, the laws of the land apply to such
material in any case: use of Internet for criminal purposes, obscenity law and law of
libel applies on any Internet site. The policing of such sites are not easy. For instance,
child pornographers are using the Internet and as these sites move from country to
country, it needs cross-border co-operation to stop such activities. Similarly, hate
literature of racist or communal variety can be circulated over the Internet and hosted on
sites in countries that have no restriction against them. For instance, a number of
neo-nazi groups use the US for hosting their sites as it does not ban such material unlike
European countries and Canada, all of whom have stringent punishment for “hate
literature”. In spite of this, the Internet is relatively free of policing, primarily
as it is not a broadcast medium.
The Convergence
Bill seeks to bring Internet services under its ambit in two ways. One way is to regulate
it through content. It explicitly lays down policing the Internet as one of the objectives
of the Bill. The second is to bring all services offered through the Internet or the
telecommunications network under licensing, unless exempted specifically. The Bill claims
that a list of exemptions will be made available along with the Bill. There are two
aspects to these so-called exemptions. Every time a new service appears — and Internet is
introducing a variety of new services every day — they will require special exemptions,
delaying their introduction. The second is which agency will issue such exemptions. From
the reading of the Bill, it is nowhere made clear which is the agency that will issue such
exemptions. It is not clear why the alternate method of identifying the services that
require licenses have not been considered. Presumably, in one case the Parliament will
decide which services will require licenses, while in the current form, probably the
government will notify such exemptions.
OTHER ISSUES
There are a
variety of other issues that are there in the Convergence Bill. We will only take up three
of them. The first is that the government has a complete right to monitor any
communications, either any telephone call or any email. There is no requirement of
establishing the need for such tapping of private communications that can be reviewed. The
desire of the government to tap is enough. This is a continuation of the Telegraph Act and
has been considered outmoded in most countries, which earlier had such provisions. The
second is that there are no restrictions on cross-media monopolies. Though protection
against monopolies in each area is one objective of the Bill, protection against
cross-media monopolies has not been identified by the Bill as an objective, This is doubly
important as unlike the TRAI Act, which left the monopoly aspects of telecommunications to
the MRTP Act, there is no such provision here. Presumably, even anti-monopoly aspects of
telecommunications are being brought under the purview of this Bill. The third is that any
public authority is obligated to provide the right-of-way for laying cables once the
Communications Commission has given a license to a party. Already, two basic service
operators and one broadband Internet service provider Reliance have dug up
various cities. Such a blanket provision does not take into account that granting
right-of-way impinges on the citizens convenience. But then, the citizen is hardly
the focus of the reforms.
All in all, the
Convergence Bill 2000, is a shoddy piece of work that addresses neither the need of the
people nor the needs of growth of the sector. The attempt appears to is a narrow one of
getting rid of the current telecom regulators while exercising some kind of control over
the broadcast medium. The bill betrays the mindset of a police state while promoting
the market and competition as the drivers of convergence. Its immediate effect will be to
muzzle the media and build cross-media empires under the guise of convergence.
