Introduction
With only a week remaining before the end of the current legislative period, the Chamber of Deputies announced that it would commence this week with forums on secondary legislation related to the constitutional reform in telecommunications and broadcasting. Once again, Morena’s legislative machinery faces pressures and errors stemming from political tantrums known as the “Plan C.”
Constitutional and T-MEC Concerns
The new telecommunications law, as previously warned in this column, will be born with constitutional infirmities by default. The constitutional reform’s Article Décimo Transitorio stipulates that secondary legislation will take effect 180 days before the constitutional reform. Consequently, we will have a telecommunications law without a constitutional foundation.
Moreover, the new legislation will also contravene the USMCA (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement), as its content, if developed based on the constitutional text approved by Congress, will establish the powers of the Digital Transformation and Telecommunications Agency (ATDT), a federal executive dependency. This contradicts USMCA Article 18.17.
Key Challenges for Telecommunications and Radiodiffusion Industries
These issues pose a significant risk to the new law’s normative force. The current legislature must ensure that political tensions originating the constitutional reform cause minimal harm to telecommunications and radiodiffusion industries. Legislators should revisit the primary challenges these sectors face and address unresolved issues from the 2013 constitutional reform.
- Implementing Effective Asymmetric Regulation: The 2013 reform introduced the concept of predominance, establishing asymmetric obligations necessary for telecommunications sector development post-two decades of market control by América Móvil. Key aspects included effective and transparent infrastructure sharing by the predominant economic agent (AEPT), zero interconnection tariff implementation, prohibition of the “club effect” practice, and restricted AEPT access to the television market.
- Eliminating Regulatory Disparity Based on Technology: The existing legal framework has been widely criticized for the regulatory imbalance between television services and virtually non-existent regulation of OTT (Over-The-Top) platforms or streaming services. While television faces numerous restrictions on content, timing, advertising, audiences, subtitles, programming, and parental controls, streaming platforms enjoy minimal regulation. This disparity creates an unfair competitive advantage that harms both concessionaires and end-users.
The current legislature should analyze this imbalance and its effects to issue legislation surpassing the obsolescence of the previous framework.
Upcoming Forums and Their Objectives
The Radio and Television Commission has indicated that the forums will focus on broad, general objectives such as “modernization in the digital convergence era” or enhancing “governance, development, and certainty of the sector.” It is hoped that political and time pressures won’t prevent legislators from addressing the industry’s concrete challenges.
