The Dominican Institute of Telecommunications (Indotel) has drafted a bill to overhaul the country's General Telecommunications Law, Law 153-98, and has deposited it with the Legal Counsel Office of the Executive Branch. The proposal is meant to address the effects of technological convergence and information and communication technologies, strengthen competition among providers, protect users, and create a cybersecurity risk-control regime that includes certifying "trusted providers."
The reform comes as the mobile phone market in the Dominican Republic remains highly concentrated. Claro Dominicana controls 63.72% of the market with more than seven million active lines, while Altice Dominicana holds 33.48% of the market and more than 3.6 million lines, a structure the article describes as oligopolistic despite existing legal protections for competition.
From monopoly to competition worldwide
Public telecommunications services were originally built as market monopolies, a model that dominated until the early 1980s before many countries introduced competition in service provision and equipment manufacturing, with the opening of network markets gaining momentum in the 1990s. Competition laws were introduced to prevent abuse of dominant market positions, illegitimate concentrations, collusive or predatory conduct, and other unfair or restrictive commercial practices.
In the United States, birthplace of the telephone in 1876, the American Bell Company held a monopoly on basic telephony for decades. Its holding company, American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), became the world's largest corporation between 1922 and 1984, controlling 90.1% of the country's call-traffic revenue by 1984. The 1996 Telecommunications Act later dismantled that monopoly and imposed a competition model across all telecom sectors.
European countries followed similar paths. Austria's liberalization began with a 1993 Telecommunications Law, followed by another in 1997. Germany ended the monopoly of Deutsche Telekom AG with a Telecommunications Law dated August 1, 1996. Portugal broke the monopoly of state operator Portugal Telecom with new legislation in 1997, and Spain's market opened with Law 11/98 of April 24, 1998, later modified by Law 32/2003 of November 3, 2003.
The Dominican Republic's path to competition
For decades, Dominican telecommunications, particularly final services, were concentrated in the hands of the state and transnational companies. The General Telecommunications Law 153-98 was not enacted until 1998, though the Executive Branch had already begun shifting public policy in the early 1990s by granting service concessions to Telepuerto San Isidro, S.A. (Tricom S.A.).
One of the law's strategic objectives was to promote market participation by providers capable of sustaining fair and effective competition. To guarantee access for new competitors, it required providers with existing networks to allow interconnection with entrants, giving Indotel the power to set access and interconnection charges when providers cannot agree. Indotel has also applied pro-competitive criteria when resolving disputes between providers, including eliminating improper interconnection charges and requiring providers to share infrastructure and related facilities when technically and operationally feasible.
The Viettel spectrum dispute
The reform debate gained urgency after Vietnamese company Viettel won an international bidding process for 240 MHz of spectrum. The award prompted a wave of suspicion about the reliability of the new competitor, including insinuations of national security risk tied to the fact that the company is controlled by the armed forces of a communist state.
The article notes that Vietnam is a United States ally with security and geopolitical cooperation agreements, and disputes sovereignty over the Paracel and Spratly islands and oil- and gas-rich areas of the South China Sea with China, even though China is Vietnam's largest trading partner and the United States its third-largest. Vietnam's shift to a market economy led to a bilateral trade agreement with the United States in 2001 that removed major trade barriers, and bilateral goods trade between the two countries reached an estimated $171 billion in 2025.
Defining a "trusted provider"
Under the draft law, a "trusted provider" is one that offers connectivity, voice, data and internet services with high availability, guaranteed security and efficient technical support. The bill would give Indotel administrative authority to certify providers under this standard, similar to the approach of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which maintains a "covered list" of telecommunications technologies, devices and services considered a national security risk.
The article points out that Viettel's 5G infrastructure relies on suppliers considered trustworthy under FCC criteria, including Ericsson, Nokia and Qualcomm, and that Vietnam is included in the Clean Network Initiative, a 2020 United States government program designed to protect telecommunications infrastructure, data and privacy from high-risk Chinese companies and governments. Under the draft bill, Indotel would also gain inspection and oversight powers over cybersecurity risks, incidents, controls and obligations, with non-compliance subject to preventive, corrective or sanctioning measures.
What comes next
The article concludes that the controversy surrounding the Viettel award was not entirely without value, since it highlighted the need for effective regulation setting minimum security and resilience standards for infrastructure, networks, systems and services, while also strengthening competition among providers so the state can expand network access, particularly internet service to vulnerable, remote or underserved populations, rather than allowing providers to concentrate only on profitable areas. The bill must still go before the legislative chambers once an open public consultation process has been completed.
