EU telecom regulators face deadline

The European Union's 27 national telecom authorities must submit plans to regulate the single European market by Feb. 16 or face ceding those powers to the European Commission, Telecommunications Commissioner Viviane Reding has warned.

The Commission wants the national regulators to join forces to form an E.U.-wide independent body akin to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. It gave them until mid February to submit plans so that it could draft legislation by July.

"A European Union-wide regulator would be a temporary body. It would be disbanded once the transition to a single competitive telecoms market is over," said Martin Selmayr, Reding's spokesman, on Monday.

Several of the national regulatory bodies have failed to prove they are independent from their governments and incumbent monopoly phone companies.

Currently, the national regulators enforce Europe-wide telecom rules in their own countries. However, they take different positions in interpreting the same rules. The U.K., for example, has cracked down on former monopoly provider BT Group, while Commission officials complain that Germany has allowed Deutsche Telekom to keep a grip on the fixed-line local loop and even receive permission to build a high-speed Internet network without sharing access with competitors.

Some countries are creating their own telecom laws without consulting their E.U. neighbors. The German regulator, for example, has failed to stop the German government from proposing a law that would grant the former monopoly Deutsche Telekom protection from competition. Other countries have failed to transpose European telecom rules into their national statute books.

In a letter to all national regulators sent at the end of last year, Reding warned that failure to submit a workable proposal for an FCC-type organization by Feb. 16 would leave her no choice but to propose greater authority for the Commission.

Reding is conducting a review of all the laws agreed in the late 1990s designed to forge a single European telecom market out of all the national ones, with open competition throughout the E.U.