COR Point 72 Freedom of Expression (ICCPR Articles 19-20)
To respond to civic concerns on the lack of legal foundation to regulate media monopolization, the National Communications Commission (NCC) submitted a draft “Act for the Prevention of Broadcasting and Television Media Monopoly and the Maintenance of Diversity” for review by the Legislative Yuan in April 2013. However, this draft bill impinged on a wide range of issues and interests and, although there was extended discussion in the Legislative Yuan, was not enacted. Subsequently, at the end of 2015, the NCC submitted five draft bills with the aim of integrating and bolstering information flows. However, the content of these bills unfortunately did not contain any regulation of media mergers.
The problem of media monopolization in Taiwan is an issue of private sector capital, but is not entirely a matter of individual capitalists monopolizing media. There is already a high degree of concentration of private ownership in Taiwan media and Taiwan’s public media is unable to effectively compete with private commercial media and its scale is even smaller than that of public media in the United States, which has the smallest share of public media among countries in Asia, Europe, the Americas and Australia. It is also noteworthy that when the United Nations Education, Science and Culture Organization (UNESCO) adopted the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions in October 2005 used the concept of “utilizing public media services” to supplant “the prevention of excessive media concentration.”
Besides opposing media monopolization, civil society organizations advocate the creation of a “Diversity Foundation” and “expansion of the scale of public media” to ensure the dissemination of diverse views.