Excesses and omissions in the new telecommunications law

Last week, I wrote about how the Telecommunications and Broadcasting Bill that President Claudia Sheinbaum submitted to the Senate violates the spirit and letter of current Article 28 of the Constitution. It's a mistake that can't be ignored, as is often done, thinking it's something they can resolve as they go. If anyone is telling the president that, they're lying.

In addition to this constitutional violation, there is another violation of the constitutional deadlines for the dissolution of the IFT and Cofece. The initiative I'm discussing and the initiative to reform the Federal Economic Competition Law (LFCE) improperly nullify these deadlines, which are not subject to interpretation or the legislator's discretion. This is another issue that must be addressed.

Once again, whoever led the president to believe that the Digital Transformation and Telecommunications Agency (ATDT) could begin acting as the telecommunications sector regulatory authority 31 days after the new telecommunications law was published, thereby decreeing the immediate extinction of the IFT, simply failed to read the Tenth and Eleventh transitory provisions of the constitutional reform decree published in the Official Gazette of the Federation on December 20, 2024, and worse still, deceived President Sheinbaum by forcing her to sign the initiative with the errors indicated.

These are fundamental errors because they unnecessarily provoke a constitutional problem, one that a diligent public servant would actually seek to avoid for the head of the Executive Branch. There are also other fundamental errors, such as the attempts at censorship contained in Articles 109 and 201, serious simply because they attempt to grant the federal government excessive powers that not even the governments of Díaz Ordaz, Echeverría, or López Portillo could have dreamed of. The legal framework did not have such excesses even in those years, although they would have us believe otherwise. In the third decade of the 21st century, it is simply madness.

However, there are some very significant omissions, such as the fact that there is no specific chapter stipulating what the regulatory authority can do, how, and where it should direct its efforts to foster the country's digital transformation, as the name of the ATDT suggests. The challenge of achieving Mexico's digital transformation goes far beyond the idea of ​​simplifying and digitizing procedures. In fact, the concept of "digital inclusion" only appears twice in the entire law.

The 2013 decree on constitutional reform on telecommunications, broadcasting, and economic competition provides in its Fourteenth Transitory Article that "the Federal Executive will be responsible for the universal digital inclusion policy, which will include objectives and goals regarding infrastructure, accessibility and connectivity, information and communication technologies, and digital skills...". It also states that the policy will have, among other goals, that at least 70 percent of all households have access with a real speed "in accordance with the average recorded in OECD member countries."

Today, we are far from that goal. According to the latest report published by the OECD, at the end of 2023, fixed broadband access in Mexico mostly corresponded to speeds below 100 Megabits per second (Mbps): around 75 percent of the population with fixed broadband access could connect at speeds of 100 Mbps or lower. Meanwhile, on average for all members of the organization, two-thirds of the population already had broadband access with speeds between 100 Mbps and 1 Gigabit per second (i.e., 1,000 Megabits per second).

Not only are we far from achieving the OECD average broadband speed for 70% of households, there is no policy to encourage these households and microenterprises to take greater advantage of this broadband, and the current government didn't even consider it a relevant issue for the new law. We're going badly.

*The author is an economist.