Profit in telecoms has often been as result of pleasing regulators as much as paying customers. Our many non-European readers may be unfamiliar with the interesting shifting dynamic of the European regulatory scene. Traditionally, national regulators have retained most of the regulatory levers; there is no real European equivalent of the relatively powerless state Public Utilities Commissions in the US, but the relationship between the states and the Feds is mirrored by that between the national governments and the European Union. Despite this, the politics could hardly be more different.
The first three years of the current European Commission (the EU’s executive branch) have been marked by unexpected activism on the part of its regulators, especially in telecoms and anti-trust. Many observers had expected that the Barroso commission would be marked by conservatism and slow decision making, as the commissioners struggled to get their confirmation hearings complete at the European Parliament. Parliamentary objections looked like they might hedge much of the activity of several commissioners; two appointments were turned down flat, and Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes was forced to promise to recuse herself from a very long list of issues due to her conflicting interests, which included directorships of every significant company in the Netherlands and a few others besides.
Amid all the fuss, you’d have been forgiven for thinking that Viviane Reding would turn out to be a reasonably uncontroversial steward of the union’s Directorate-General for Media and the Information Society; certainly no-one was particularly incensed at the Luxemburgish journalist’s appointment. However, neither conflicts or obscurity held them back; Kroes and Reding have probably been the most visible and effective of the commissioners, and their confrontations with the telecoms and IT industries have been positively bruising.
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