National Communications Commission Chairperson Su Herng (蘇蘅) yesterday said the commission did not delay or deliberately suspend the review of Want Want China Broadband’s acquisition of the cable TV services owned by China Network System (CNS), adding that the ruling was made when the commission felt the time was right.
Su made the comments after presiding over her last meeting at the commission, as she steps down tomorrow.
During the meeting, Su and three other commissioners confirmed the records of the meeting held on Wednesday last week, when they issued the ruling on the Want Want-CNS deal.
The ruling included three main conditions and 25 other stipulations that Want Want is required to follow. For the ruling to take effect, Want Want must fulfill all three conditions: Tsai and his family members must disassociate themselves from the operation the CtiTV news channel; China Television’s (CTV) digital news channel must be changed to make it a non-news channel; and CTV must have an independent editorial office.
Want Want has agreed to adhere to the 25 commitments, including spending NT$8.3 billion (US$276 million) to increase the penetration rate of the digital cable service to 100 percent. However, it had indicated that it did not agree to those three conditions and had problem abiding by them.
The commission had deliberated the case for 18 months.
Su said the commission was set to issue the ruling on the case after it had held the public hearing over the case in May, adding that similar cases in other countries, such as the merger of Comcast and NBC Universal in the US, had required about the same amount of time.
While many have compared the case with Dafu Media’s purchase of cable services owned by Kbro, Su emphasized that the commission had also spent about 15 months reviewing Dafu-Kbro case.
She said the Want Want-CNS deal was very complicated and the commission has asked the company to provide a lot of information. Some commissioners even had to calculate Want Want’s influence using statistical models, she said.
Another factor affecting the review, she said, was the health problems of commissioner Wei Shyue-win (魏學文). With three other commissioners withdrawing from the review of the case, the commission could not start reviewing the deal until Wei returned, she said.
Meanwhile, the commission also spent a substantial amount of time consulting governmental agencies on several issues related to the cases, particularly those involving the regulations banning political parties, government and the military from running the media, Su said.
The new commissioners will determine if the group has kept to the conditions.
Counselor Huang Chin-yi (黃金益) said the cable TV service operators can decide which channels are included in the services they offer, which could indirectly affect the type of information that consumers could receive. The same right also allows cable operators to control channel operators, he said.
“So [the commission considered] it is inappropriate that those with a large market share in the cable TV market to possess or control the news channel, which shapes public opinion,” Huang said.
Commission data show the Want Want China Times Group owns 11.87 percent of the newspaper industry, 5.05 percent of the magazine market, 11.73 percent of the news Web site services, 22.05 percent of news channel services, 19.07 percent of the terrestrial TV services and 21.58 percent of satellite channels.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater