|
Author: Stefano Nicoletti
11 December 2006
The European Competitive Telecommunications Association (ECTA) has today published its fourth regulatory scorecard assessing the effectiveness of regulators in Europe. ECTA says the top regulators are the UK, Denmark and France while the laggards are Germany, Greece and Poland. ECTA also stresses that three years after the new EU regulatory framework has been introduced, and eight after liberalization, regulation across Europe is still patchy and fragmented and there is still a lot to be done.
Comment: Not much has changed from previous ECTA scorecards - only a timid improvement of the German national regulatory authority (NRA) ranking in the scorecard from last to third last, which is certainly not reassuring when you think it's the largest country and, with its 80 million citizens, accounts for almost a fifth of telecommunication service users in the EU.
What emerges from the ECTA report is what we've been saying for a long time: the EU telecoms framework has been implemented slowly, with significant differences among countries, and with problems arising through regulators' lack of operational and political independence. It is easy to appeal against decisions regulators make, and dispute resolution mechanisms don't work effectively. However, ECTA's MD Steen Clausen told us he still likes the framework and its principles, in his words, 'it's not broken, it needs to evolve'. Clausen would like a more consistent implementation across Europe, he wants more harmonised remedies and a more prominent role for the European Regulators Group (ERG).
Clausen wants to see a UK-style remedy such as BT's Operational separation as one of the available remedies for NRAs. He would also like to see national regulators take decisions independently; there is no need for the introduction of the long discussed EU commission Veto power on NRA's remedies in his view.
Both points, we believe, would make little difference. To introduce operational separation in the Directives as a possible remedy would take at least two years plus the time needed to ratify the EU directive into national law, furthermore separation is all about how you implement it - there is no guarantee that a further remedy will improve the big picture in practice. Thirdly, the UK experiment has yet to prove successful. On the second point, keeping the status quo (no veto on the remedies) won't necessarily help harmonisation, and giving ERG an increasingly important role could create problems between the ERG and the Commission over who is doing what in Brussels.
Clausen sympathized with us on some of our concerns but he believes other more radical proposals such as asking for Government divesture from incumbents, pushing for real NRA independence or for more effective enforcement procedures are difficult causes to advocate and fall too much in the political sphere, far beyond mere telecoms regulatory policy. Sadly, we can only agree with this.
|
