I've sat in front of a panel of communications lawyers--and I'm not a lawyer--on the issue of whether fusion is a good idea or not. They all said, “Well, if you fused the two acts, you'd still have to create a broadcasting act within the same one, and they go through the legal and parliamentary system. It would take a few years before you'd get a fusion, so why don't we do some quick fixes?”
When people talk about a fusing of telecommunications and broadcasting, what they really mean is ripping out the broadcasting provisions so that we don't have to mess around when we're getting into these difficult areas of what constitutes broadcasting and what does not constitute broadcasting. That's a very messy area. An easy way to do it is to fuse the two--just have a telecommunications act and dispense with the Broadcasting Act--but I don't think this country is going in that direction.