Lobbying by ANGA Der Breitbandverband e.V.

See ANGA's complete response in the attached pdf file. On 21st February the European Commission presented a working paper entitled How to master Europe's digital infrastructure needs?. The paper aims to form the basis for the next European Commission's legislative agenda for the telecoms sector and to identify the key policy reforms needed to improve the investment climate and structural market conditions in order to achieve the EU's digital objectives. It thus represents an important step not only for the further roll out of digital infrastructures in the Member States, but also for the creation of a genuine internal market for telecommunications in Europe. ANGA strongly disagrees with the Commissions finding, that the regulatory system should be shifted away from the approach to address significant market power in an undertaking towards a symmetric approach regulating all network operators to the same extent. At least in Germany but also other member states the market situation does not justify such a paradigm shift. To the contrary, we fear massive market disruptions if the Commission would proceed in this direction. The Commission insinuates that there is sufficient competition in gigabit infrastructures that would (possibly) justify the reduction of the regulation of companies with significant market power (SMP regulation). That is not the case in Germany and other member states. In Germany, we see clear re-monopolisation tendencies in the fixed networks sector: Deutsche Telekom is still increasing its already high market share in the German DSL market from 53 per cent ten years ago to currently al-most 60 per cent according to the latest VATM market study, 25 years after liberalisation. It is clear that the former monopolists try to take along the market power they acquired and maintained on the old copper network to the new fibre-optic world. Therefore, now is not the time to deregulate the dominant companies in the fixed network sector. Instead, it is necessary to discuss which regulatory instruments are suitable to effectively control the considerable market power in a future fibre-optic world and to strengthen infrastructure competition. The Commissions approach is to push for a small number of pan-European telecoms operators, consolidating the market to a large extent. The objective is to make the EU more competitive in an international setting. What the Commission ignores is that in many EU countries, and especially in Germany, fibre roll-out is conducted to a large extent by alternative operators and not the incumbents. This dynamic would be hampered or even completely undermined by de-regulating the ex-monopolists and treating all telecoms operators similarly following a symmetric approach. The migration from the incumbents copper networks towards fiber networks is one of the most important tasks for the coming years. This process will pre-design the future market situation to a large extent. It is now that we have to make the right decisions in order to prevent ex-monopolists to take along their significant market power from the old copper world into the new fiber world. ANGA strongly suggests that NRAs take action right away and design a competition neutral and non-discriminatory migration framework that allows all competitors to thrive.

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Response to Review of the Broadband Cost Reduction Directive (Directive 2014/61/EU)

16 May 2023

Please see the attached file.

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