A regulator with nobody home
As of August 1, 2026, Taiwan's National Communications Commission (NCC) has zero sitting commissioners for the first time in its 20-year history. The terms of its last three members — who had been governing with a partial bench since four seats emptied out in August 2024 — expired July 31, and the Legislative Yuan has twice failed to confirm replacements, rejecting a full slate of four nominees in November 2025 after the Executive Yuan had already withdrawn an earlier slate in May 2025 (Legislative Yuan; Focus Taiwan). The Executive Yuan has since nominated a fresh seven-person slate, led by chair nominee Yuan Hsiu-hui, but confirmation is not guaranteed and takes months even when it succeeds.
The practical fallout is immediate and large. The NCC's own statute requires "consent of over half" of its seven seats to pass any resolution — a four-vote floor that cannot be met with zero members (NCC Organization Act, Art. 10, law.moj.gov.tw). With no quorum, the commission cannot approve any penalty above NT$500,000, the threshold under the Cable Radio and Television Act and Satellite Broadcasting Act that covers fines for news channels broadcasting fake news that damages the public interest, along with program suspensions and license revocations. Roughly 748 matters have piled up awaiting commission review since December 2024 (Liberty Times). In just the first week without any commissioners, the agency delayed 82 device-import permits and four approval notices; one consumer reportedly couldn't clear customs on a camera for lack of an NCC certification (Taiwan News). By mid-August, the Executive Yuan had deputized the NCC's secretary-general as a stopgap "representative," but he can only process routine internal-unit matters — not the roughly 280 documents and 269 approval cases genuinely requiring commissioner sign-off (Taipei Times).
The design was the point
It's worth taking seriously why Taiwan built the NCC this way. A seven-member commission, requiring cross-party legislative confirmation and a supermajority-adjacent quorum before any speech-adjacent penalty takes effect, is not bureaucratic accident — it is the direct alternative to the model Taiwan explicitly rejected in 2022. That year, the NCC itself drafted a Digital Intermediary Services Act modeled loosely on the EU's Digital Services Act, which would have let government offices investigate and order removal of "disinformation" on platforms. Taiwanese civil society revolted: more than 30,000 citizens opposed it on the government's own public-comment platform versus under 150 in favor, and the NCC shelved the draft within ten weeks of publishing it (New Bloom Magazine). The lesson Taipei drew was that unilateral executive power to police "fake news" is dangerous, and that any enforcement mechanism needs plural, legislatively-vetted decision-makers standing between a fine and a broadcaster. The quorum requirement is that safeguard operationalized.
That argument deserves to be stated fully before it's challenged, because the people currently blocking confirmations can invoke it too: an opposition-controlled legislature refusing to rubber-stamp a ruling party's regulatory nominees is exactly the check the confirmation requirement exists to provide.
But paralysis is not the same as scrutiny
The problem is that withholding confirmation indefinitely doesn't produce more deliberation — it produces the functional equivalent of abolishing the agency, achieved without a vote to abolish it. A cross-party research note from NYU's U.S.-Asia Law Institute documents this isn't isolated to telecoms regulation: the Constitutional Court sits with 8 of 15 seats filled, the Control Yuan faces its own July 2026 lapse, the Central Election Commission has 8 of 11 seats, and the Fair Trade Commission is down to 5 of 7 — a pattern the authors describe as the KMT-TPP legislative majority "weaponizing the confirmation power" against DPP appointees (USALI). Whichever side is right about motive, the mechanism is the same: a body designed to require consensus before acting has been repurposed to guarantee inaction, with collateral damage — radio-frequency import certifications, broadcast license renewals, ordinary telecoms permitting — that has nothing to do with disinformation policy at all. Broadcasters, meanwhile, are operating on licenses that have technically lapsed because there's no commission to renew them, a rule-of-law problem in its own right.
The pro-speech position here isn't ambiguous, but it also isn't "give someone emergency authority to break the deadlock." Handing the Executive Yuan or the secretary-general unilateral power to impose fake-news penalties without commission sign-off would recreate precisely the unchecked-censorship risk the 2022 backlash was about. The better fix, which USALI and Taiwanese commentators have both floated, is structural: a holdover provision letting outgoing commissioners keep serving until successors are confirmed — standard practice at agencies like the U.S. FCC and FEC — so that legislative gridlock degrades the confirmation pipeline without shutting off the institution. Taiwan's Legislative Yuan should pass one before the next term expiration turns into the next multi-month paralysis.