House committee pushes for ‘stronger’ NTC, ICT department

The information and communications technology (ICT) committee of the House of Representatives will be pushing for a “stronger” National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) and the creation of a Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT).

House ICT committee chairman Catanduanes Rep. Joseph Santiago, a former NTC chief, said the committee’s legislative priorities include building up the NTC and revisiting the 1995 Public Telecommunications Policy Act.

He said he intends to push for the creation of a new, full-blown DICT that would attend to ICT concerns.

The lawmaker also vowed to transform the NTC into “a more potent quasi-judicial regulator and a dynamic driver of ICT growth.”

“We will propose new legislation to reinforce the NTC, raise the capabilities of its officers and staff, and insulate the commission as much as possible from the whims of politics,” Santiago said.

“Going forward, we are definitely counting on ICT to impel economic and employment expansion in big way. And we expect the NTC to cultivate a regulatory and policy environment that will usher in this growth,” Santiago stressed.

Santiago also said he sees the NTC contributing incrementally to the national treasury. “As ICT grows by leaps and bounds, so will the potential revenues from fees collected by the commission.”

Last year, the NTC generated P2.26 billion in revenues from telecommunications service providers, TV and radio broadcasting companies and other supervised entities. The amount was 21 percent higher than the P1.87 billion that the commission collected in 2005.

Santiago added his committee would “revisit” the Public Telecommunications Policy Act, with the end in view of making the law “wholly responsive to the fast-evolving ICT landscape.”

He pointed out that rapid ICT advances have “overwhelmed” the law.

“We have to update the law, and keep its provisions as broad as possible, for instance, with respect to treatment of potential new technologies, and leave the particulars entirely up to the NTC.”

He pointed that at present, there is ambiguity whether this or that entity should be treated as a service or a value-added service (VAS) provider, and whether this or that function or offering should be regarded as a VAS or not.

“Yet, the truth of the matter is, there are simply too many new technologies now that Congress did not even conceive of when it passed the law 12 years ago. So we may have to reshape the law precisely to keep it totally open to new technologies,” he stressed.