The Colombian government has formally withdrawn an October 2017 bill seeking to merge two of the country’s regulatory bodies, Prensario Internacional reports. It is understood that while a converged regulatory landscape is still seen as a priority, the bill itself included a number of divisive clauses relating to the funding of the public television sector, prompting its withdrawal by Juanita Rodriguez Kattah, the Vice-Minister of Digital Economy.
As previously reported by TeleGeography’s CommsUpdate, in October last year the Ministry of Information Technology and Communications (Ministerio de Tecnologias de la Informacion y las Comunicaciones, MinTIC) declared its intention to transform the Commission for the Regulation of Communications (Comision de Regulacion de Comunicaciones, CRC) and the National Television Authority (Autoridad Nacional de Television, ANTV) into a new, enlarged regulatory body, which would have been named the Communications Commission (Comision de Comunicaciones). The move was conceived as a way to better equip the watchdog as the pace of convergence within the telecoms and broadcasting sectors gathers pace.