National Communications Commission Chairman Howard Shyr (石世豪) said yesterday that the draft of a digital convergence act (數位匯流法) would not be finalized next month, adding that the act must be formulated in ways that can solve the problems facing the local media industry.
“We never planned to submit a draft act in March,” Shyr said. “What we are concerned about is whether the act itself can practically remove the barriers to competition in the market and solve the problems we are dealing with at the moment.”
Shyr said that lawmakers had told the commission that it should spend more time listening to public opinion before formulating the articles in the proposed act.
To draft the act, Shyr said that the commission has laid out 12 major issues to be discussed at public hearings.
Some of them are controversial, including whether different telecoms should share the use of Chunghwa Telecom’s “last mile” infrastructure; whether political parties, the government and the military should be allowed to have stakes in media outlets, and how to prevent monopolization of the meda.
Shyr said that the commission aims to finish gathering opinions on the different issues this year, without committing to a deadline to submit a finalized draft act.
However, he said that the commission still has the first draft of an act drawn up in 2007, which contains 185 articles.
“We will not insist on which draft of the act we will use,” he said. “We hope that the public can reach a consensus on the different issues and based on that consensus we will stipulate new articles or change the existing ones. We want to be able to finalize the draft act as soon as possible, but we don’t want to compromise on the quality of the act either.”
Other important issues to be addressed by the proposed act include whether the government should lift the cap on the rates telecoms charge consumers and whether to continue regulating wholesale prices the telecoms charge each other.
The draft act will also aim to provide solutions to increase the number of homes that have access to optical fibers.
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:
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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