I refuse to believe as true the versions that indicate that in the Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT) there is an interpretation of some officials who apparently believe that the express prohibition contained in Condition 1.9 of the Telmex concession title, modified in 1990 as a consequence of the privatization process of the then parastatal company, which in its third paragraph clearly states that “Telmex will not be able to exploit, directly or indirectly, any concession of television services to the public in the country.”
According to the explanations that have transpired, there are those who think in the IFT that Telmex could mock the letter and the spirit of this fundamental regulatory provision because any new company that is not part of the economic interest group that makes up the Preponderant Economic Agent will not be The aforementioned prohibition applies, because according to those who uphold that thesis, the qualifier would not be applied to that new company, directly or indirectly, and consequently, it should not have an impediment to access the provision of the service that is expressly prohibited.
Accepting that interpretation could lead us to the extreme of accepting that América Móvil decides to create a new company that is hypothetically called Telefonos para Ingenuos, which from now on provides local access service and offers broadband services, instead of Telmex, the incumbent operator that has so far exploited the network that it obtained from the Mexican state through that bidding process and that, in effect, has expanded over the years, but not at the rate of the extra normal profits that it obtained during a good number of years.
Under this approach, Telefonos para Ingenuos could provide the telecommunications services that Telmex provides today, using the Telmex network, of course, but without the restrictions or obligations that Telmex has to meet as part of the Preponderant Economic Agent. Yes, it is an extreme interpretation, but it is equivalent to thinking that a company like Claro TV does not have the limitations to which either the legal framework or its concession title are subject to Telmex or Telcel, to mention to the two relevant operators of that group.
Due to the absurdity of the interpretation, I refuse to believe that there are really officials at the IFT who think that it is valid to do these creative readings of the legal framework.
I have sustained it for a long time, in the face of the challenges that Mexico still faces and especially in the face of the operator that, even under the most demanding asymmetric obligations that have been imposed, maintains a market share of more than 60 percent of the global telecommunications sector. In eight long years of the new regulatory stage, there is no room for naivety, or for consideration. Regulatory errors that restore power to an economic agent of that size are too costly, not only for the telecommunications sector, but worse still, for the entire country where they occur.
How soon they forget the years in which Telmex obtained extraordinary profits, at the expense of the thousands of Mexicans who called their families in Mexico from the United States, and that thanks to a generous and tricky mechanism for the distribution of long-distance income known as the Proportional Return, allowed Telmex to pocket amounts close to one billion dollars per year, just for that service.
Or the billions of pesos that it also obtained in an extraordinary way for years for a concept that the previous regulatory body was allowed to keep intact for a long time, the billing and collection service, which charged for every minute of a telephone call fixed from your network to a mobile number. It seems to many that it is easy for them to forget the mechanisms that he had at hand and that allowed him to extract income from millions of Mexican families over the years. Hopefully they review well the history of telecommunications in the country and avoid falling into the trap of the wolf.
* The author is an economist.
@GerardoFloresR
Telecommunications expert
Economic Momentum
Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx