The European super-agency

I personally have been cheering in support of Viviane Reding’s proposed plans to set up a Europe-wide oversight body and mandate functional separation of telecommunications providers.  But it looks as if national regulators in Europe are fiercely fighting back.  This Reuters article suggests that Ofcom and others are opposed to a pan-Europe regulator on the ground that such a body would be a top-down, single-answer entity.  Ofcom’s Ed Richards also points out that functional separation (well, for DSL, not fiber) has been achieved in the UK without a Europe-wide mandate.

This is all very interesting from a U.S. perspective. Reding seems to have the right ideas, and they’re big ideas, but the national regulators are resisting the notion of an overlord - and seem from this article to be beefing up an existing (but insufficiently strong) group-institution-for-national-regulators as an answer to her plans.  (This is the “you can’t fight something with nothing” move.)

Here in the U.S., by contrast, we *have* a regulator overlord, but the big ideas are absent within that institution and the out-manuevering by the incumbents is impressive.

====I spent the morning listening to Monday’s FCC hearing and will report tomorrow.  The seat-blocking by Comcast isn’t so interesting to me, but the substance of the hearing is.

February 27, 2008 | Filed Under communications policy, fcc 

Comments

4 Responses to “The European super-agency”

  1. Kat on February 28th, 2008 2:49 am

    I thought the seat traffic story made a nice parallel to the internet traffic story. Nice concrete illustration of the sort of thing net neutrality advocates are afraid of.

  2. hp lehofer on February 28th, 2008 4:12 am

    Seen from a distance, and judging merely from press releases and news articles feeding on press releases and news agencies, things might seem more interesting and more promising than they are in reality. I do invite you to read the full proposal of the European Commission - I think it is a far cry from a European Superagency, but rather a very bureaucratic organization that basically serves to cover up the transfer of competences from the member states to the commission. One might reason whether that would be a good thing to do, but that should be a different discussion
    For a start, I’d point you to a few posts on the “superagency” on our blog here:
    http://www.contentandcarrier.eu/?s=superagency

  3. Rudolf van der Berg on February 29th, 2008 10:54 am

    Hi Susan,

    From a distance the Euro-superregulator sounds like a reasonable idea. But in reality it’s quite different. The trouble is that the organisation of the EU is such that the European Commission is not really accountable to anyone. This has been quite clear in recent years. The introduction of the Euro super duper regulator would only upset the balance even more and result in a disaster. Having been on the inside of the debate I’ve written about my view on it on the link below.

    http://lunaticthought.blogspot.com/2007/11/european-telecom-market-authority.html

  4. admin on February 29th, 2008 1:00 pm

    Thanks, Kat/HP/Rudolf - great comments, and thanks for the pointers to better resources on the Euro regulator idea. Susan

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