Thailand to host ASEAN telecom and broadcast agencies meeting in late 2018

BANGKOK, September 11 (TNA) - The National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) has announced that Thailand will host a meeting of ASEAN telecommunications and broadcasting agencies in late 2018. NBTC Secretary-General Takorn Tantasith made the announcement while delivering a speech at the International Symposium on Converging Trchnology and Disruptive Communication-Moving Forward, held in Bangkok on September 10. Takorn said NBTC will propose at the upcoming meeting of the ASEAN telecommunications and broadcasting agencies that a new taxation system, called over the top (OTT) taxation, be imposed on service providers of online business platforms as a fair regulation in the regional telecommunication and broacasting sector. Takorn cited statistics from Thailand's Digital Advertising Association as indicating that a total budget of as high as about 14 billion baht would be spent for business advertisements on the digital media in country, namely the Facebook and the YouTube platforms, by the end of this year, a 21 per cent year-on-year jump; while business advertisements on television channels have dropped by about 10 per cent annually since 2015 to about 2 billion baht totally now, from about 2.5 billion baht totally over the past three years. The NBTC chief noted that most of the service providers of the digital media are foreign firms whose revenues have not been taxed by the Thai government so far, causing a huge opportunity loss for financial gains towards the national development, the similar incident of which has also been faced by other member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). According to the NBTC chief, the newly-proposed OTT taxation, covering the value-added tax the corporate tax, will only be part of the regional regulation of telecommunication and broadcasting agencies' revenues and will be nothing to do with different regulations of their content by separate member countries. (TNA)