The convergence of services in Cable networks put countries in front of a new challenge, the regulatory challenge: how to regulate that infrastructure of the information. Maintain regulation by services? Perhaps grant single license? Single license around the telecommunications or around television? That's the pain headlong.
The difference is not little mount. A regulatory convergence around the telecommunications favors the market, business, the economy, competition; a convergence made from television preserves content, culture and freedom of information. That is the dilemma of States.
The great risk of convergence regulatory made from telecommunications, lies in the fact that this is a sector generally controlled by the governments of each country, while the trend is to look for television is increasingly distant from the executive branch and closer to society. A television under the control of any Government puts freedom of expression and the right to receive information, which are fundamental in democracy.
In Colombia, the Ministry of Communications has presented to the Congress of the Republic a controversial bill to make regulatory convergence around of telecommunications. That has set off everyone's alarms. television sectors: producers, broadcasters, advertisers and journalists, because in the country the government, through of the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission CRT, controls those services.
The Colombian government proposes that the law declares as an added value the television that is distributes using artificial guide. In this way, the subscriber television would be under government control, with the risks that this implies for information democracy.
But given that in Colombia the competition to regulate television has been attributed to it by the Political Constitution to an autonomous body such as the National Television Commission-CNTV, the aforementioned bill proposes a change in the definition of television, which excludes that which is distributed using artificial guide. Thus, the television by subscribers would be considered a service of added value. Such a claim has been compared as if the water from rivers will one day cease to be water due to the fact that it is distributed to households through networks.
This fact would bring with it the impossibility for the State to regulate the contents of the television by subscribers in favour of audiences, because cease to be legally considered as a television service, the regulatory body, the CNTV, would lose competence to act about her.
The Congress of the Republic sees in the new definition a government ruse to be made to the control of much of the television and enter to drive directly the resources generated by the sector.
There is no denying that, from the business and competition point of view, it turns out total regulatory convergence is interesting, but in the light of freedom of expression would not be bad if the limit was the content, for all that it implies in the formation of public opinion and for being a service intrinsic to the social function of the State.
In that scenario, governments grant single licences for telephony services, data and the internet, and an independent state body would grant licences for television, without any collision of competences, enabling technological convergence in same networks, but on the basis of enabling certificates issued by different authorities.
Beyond the certain need to order the telecommunications sector and to facilitate the citizens' access to these services, States will have to make regulatory efforts to guarantee in full exercise of freedom of information, without this meaning a brake on convergence and technological development.
