The European Framework for Regulating Telecommunications: A 25-year Appraisal

Martin Cave,Tommaso Valletti,Christos Genakos

doi:10.1007/s11151-019-09686-6

Abstract

The European telecommunications sector has been radically transformed in the past 25 years: from a group of state monopolies to a set of increasingly competitive markets. In this paper we summarize how this process has unfolded—for both fixed and mobile telecommunications—by focusing on the evolution of the regulatory framework and by drawing some parallels with the evolution of the sector in the US. Given the major strategic importance of the sector, we highlight some of the challenges that lie ahead.

Highlights

Few sectors have undergone so rapid a transformation in the past 25 years as telecommunications
Data traffic transmitted via the internet was emerging at that time from the rarefied US environments of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) and becoming both public and commercial—aided by the development of the World Wide Web
In this paper we summarize how this process has unfolded in Europe over the last 25 years and discuss how the regulatory regime has adapted, and, in particular, how it has in recent years shepherded the sector towards significant changes in market structure

Summary

Introduction

Few sectors have undergone so rapid a transformation in the past 25 years as telecommunications. Social media were not to follow for nearly another decade In those 25 years, analogue transmission in the telecommunications sector has long given way to digital; but the sector’s role as an enabler of the digital transformation of the economy and society is just beginning, with numerous predictions that almost every act of consumption and production—in both the private and the public sector, as well as of social intercourse—will be transformed by the new cluster of information and communication general purpose technologies. The impact of the European single market has been felt through the free movement of capital and in the form of a uniform regulatory regime that applies in all Member States. It is the latter aspect which is considered here.

The Long Road from Regulating Monopolists to Oligopoly

The EU-15 comprises the following countries

The Long ROAD in Fixed Telecommunications Networks

The Long Road in Mobile Networks

Findings

Conclusions