The European Commission isn’t looking to create a...

The European Commission isn’t looking to create a pan-EU telecom regulator or Europe-wide spectrum licenses in its upcoming legislative package on a single telecom market, it said Monday. The proposed measure, due out Wednesday, has been floating around in various leaked drafts for months. Among other things, the EC will propose to: (1) Help operators who want to offer cross-border services by providing a one-stop authorization shop. (2) Remove inconsistent obligations for operators that provide services in more than one country by giving the EC more oversight over national regulatory decisions. (3) Standardize fixed access products such as virtual unbundled local access and ethernet leased lines, to make it easier for market entrants. (4) Create a more coordinated approach to spectrum management, with the EC having new power to review national assignment procedures and timetables. (5) Allow infrastructure and spectrum sharing and spectrum trading, and promote the use and deployment of Wi-Fi and small cells to increase capacity. (6) Harmonize fully consumer protection laws and end misleading touting of Internet speeds. The package will also guarantee net neutrality by putting an end to blocking and throttling, while giving operators the option to offer higher speeds or better quality according to user needs. The EC will also push mobile operators to create by next year EU-wide roaming bundles and end charges for incoming roaming calls, it said. The proposals in the latest leaked draft sparked criticism over the weekend from independent telecom consultant Innocenzo Genna, who accused Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes of trying to change the “fundamental paradigm of net neutrality.” The final package is likely to have net neutrality provisions that may substantially affect the balance between network operators and ISPs, with a big impact on consumers, Genna wrote on his radiobruxelleslibera blog (http://bit.ly/18J2d5s). Kroes appears ready to allow network providers including ISPs to arbitrarily discriminate and charge for Internet services “with the sole scope to privilege some Internet services instead of others,” and without justification, he said. Dominant players will be able to extract money from the over-the-top business and make up for declining margins, he said. Consumers will then select services not only on the basis of their intrinsic features but on the cost of the Internet connectivity needed to access them, he said. For streaming music, users will be naturally induced to opt for free-connectivity services even if they are not as good in terms of quality or variety of offers, he said. The problem already exists because there are no rules barring European ISPs from differentiating connectivity costs to discriminate against Internet services, he said. But ISPs “have been cautious” and few have discriminated out of fear of regulation, he said. The single market proposal will overturn existing national laws on net neutrality and prevent governments from ever intervening on the issue again, he said. The only obstacle for network providers will be antitrust rules, which don’t work well in oligopolistic markets like the telecom sector because collective dominance is hard to enforce, he said. The potential problem could be solved if the final package sets a clear non-discrimination obligation on ISPs and other network providers that bars them from differentiating access prices unless justified by specific circumstances such as quality, speed or capacity, he said. Once operators are free to arbitrarily charge for Internet services, they'll stop innovating, he said.