An ambitious package to overhaul telecom regulations in the European Union is running into static from industry executives.

Telecom executives asked the European Commission last week to think twice before moving forward with an ambitious reform package intended to overhaul the telecom sector, especially provisions to end roaming fees and place a cap on the price of cross-border phone calls, according to a Reuters report on an industry conference in Brussels. Executives would like to see further deregulation to help boost their ability to compete.

Europe is trailing Asia and the United States in its high-speed mobile and broadband infrastructure. Proponents of the reform package say the overhaul would help address that problem.

“Let's stop talking about the package, because in my view it is going to be largely irrelevant,” Stephane Richard, chief executive of Orange in France, said at the conference sponsored by the European Telecommunications Network Operators' Association (ETNO) and Financial Times. He added that other pieces of the reform package intended to help industry, like easing the way for operators to expand into other member states, would take too long to come to fruition.     

“We need new rules on competition and antitrust … and there should be complete deregulation in markets that are already competitive,” added Timotheus Hoettges, chief financial officer of Deutsche Telekom.

European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes, the commissioner in charge of the digital agenda, is pushing the reform package to move the EU closer to a single telecom market. She believes the current fractured state of the industry harms both businesses and consumers. Kroes also was at the ETNO conference, and defended the need for the reforms. She said revised regulations would provide for a more “predictable environment for investment.”

New Study

Also last week, a study on the Digital Single Market indicated that quantitative data was lacking for many of the DSM initiatives. The study, which was commissioned by European Parliament's Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection, applied a performance-based policy approach to 10 specific DSM initiatives.

The study supported the aim of the Digital Single Market, but recommended better use of quantitative data in setting objectives, the addition of quantifiable indicators of expected outcomes, a detailed accounting of synergies between directives, a detailed plan for collecting data upon implementation, and a timeline for the desired outcome to materialize. The report recommended robust, ex-post assessment of the performance of DSM initiatives by an independent body.

The report also called for the creation of a Digital Single Market Scoreboard. The scoreboard would track the state and quality of the transposition of the directives, the effectiveness and enforcement of the regulations, national laws transposing the directives, expected outcomes and impacts, and actual outcomes and impacts. The report said the scoreboard also should provide data on how much DSM initiatives are costing businesses and citizens in cases in which the initiatives are not achieving the desired outcomes.

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