Liikanen confident countries will correctly apply telecoms laws

By Peter Chapman

Date: 13/11/03

ERKKI Liikanen, the commissioner for enterprise and information society, remains confident that countries which missed a deadline for implementing new telecoms laws will not make mistakes in the way they eventually apply the rules.

He has launched legal action against eight member states that failed to transpose a new slimline regime of communications laws and procedures into national law by July, as requested.

The Commission's telecoms chief blamed delays on administrative problems in national parliaments: "I don't expect that any governments misinterpreted the message," he said, adding that the new laws were "critical for markets and for investment".

The shake-up aims to get rid of swathes of regulations governing the way the former telecoms monopolies operate. In their place is a new "technology neutral" regime, designed to boost the emergence of different technologies and firms in the communications field by regulating them all in essentially the same way.

The eight countries which have failed to implement the rules on time are Belgium, Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Portugal.

Meanwhile, Liikanen voiced concern about the way some of the EU's future ten members are preparing in the telecoms field. A key issue, he said, is the need to ensure that national regulators in these countries are fully independent from the former monopoly operators, still owned by government in most accession countries.

MEP Nick Clegg, responsible for a series of reports on telecoms, attacked the Commission last week for being "strangely reluctant to clobber candidate countries".

He said the EU executive is still too focused on getting countries to meet the previous regime dating from 1998.