Portugal plans to launch telecoms regulator during its EU presidency
Thursday, 10 May 2007
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Portugal yesterday put itself on a collision course with national regulators by announcing it will use its forthcoming European Union presidency to launch a single super-regulator to police the telecoms industry across all 27 member states.
Mario Lino, the Portuguese public works minister, said the creation of a single telecoms regulator for the EU would be a "priority" for the country's presidency, which begins in July.
"These are important dossiers for the future of the sector that include relevant issues such as the creation of a European regulator and the way this regulator interacts with other national regulators," Mr Lino said.
The minister's pledge follows a series of complaints from Viviane Reding, the EU information society commissioner, who has responsibility for telecoms. She has consistently argued that existing European regulations are not applied even-handedly by national regulators across the EU.
Ms Reding has become increasingly frustrated by member states' inability to harmonise telecoms regulation. She has also been stymied this week in an attempt to force through new regulations on the amount mobile phone companies may charge customers using their mobiles while abroad in EU countries.
The current framework for EU-wide telecoms regulation was launched in 2003 and is due to run until 2010, under the supervision of the European Regulators Group of member countries' national watchdogs.
While the group is not opposed to the launch of a single regulator for new technologies that cross international boundaries it is likely to strongly resist any attempt to take away the existing powers of national regulators.
Privately, the group accepts Ms Reding's warnings that member states have not always interpreted the 2003 regulations in a consistent way. But it will argue that greater harmonisation is better achieved by fine-tuning the existing regulatory system rather than launching a new super-regulator. The group is also concerned that an attempt to launch a new regulator when the current agreement expires in 2010 would render the last three years of the framework inoperable.
A spokesman for Ofcom, the UK telecoms regulator, said that it would work with Brussels officials to develop the current framework and achieve greater harmonisation.
"We support the Commission in looking for ways to make EU regulation more consistent and effective," he said. "The detail of any proposal will be important, however - we will be especially keen to see what the core tasks, legal basis and powers of any new institution will be, for example."
