By Matt Williams - 22nd April 2008
MEPs have spoken out against several proposals from the European commission concerning the creation of an EU-wide telecoms regulatory authority.
Spanish MEP Pilar del Castillo Vera, parliament’s rapporteur on the commission’s proposal for a European electronic communications market authority (EECMA), said the plan could prove to be too bureaucratic to work effectively.
“The commission’s proposal is full of goodwill. But as I see it the proposal does have some fundamental problems,” she said at a press conference on Wednesday.
“It would be very easy to end up with the creation of a very large bureaucracy which to a certain extent would prevent the commission from fighting to introduce better regulation.
“[The plan] was too much of a threat to the principle of subsidiarity because it took too much away, in my opinion, from the member states and the national regulators in terms of their competences in this field,” she added.
UK deputy Malcolm Harbour, rapporteur on the universal services directive, also said that the commission’s proposals lacked focus.
“We think that the mechanism they proposed was rather unwieldy and not properly focused,” he said.
“We need to provide the investors in this sector a much more stable regulatory framework in which they feel confident about making those investments,” he added.
Parliament has suggested an alternative to the commission’s proposal, a new body based on European regulations, to be called BERT (body of European regulators and telecoms).
The EU would supply a third of the funding for the proposed BERT authority, with two-thirds coming from the member states via their national regulatory authorities.
Parliament’s rapporteur on the telecoms framework directive, Catherine Trautmann, is unhappy with the commission’s proposal to give the EU authority power to veto decisions taken by national regulatory authorities.
Trautmann proposed a “dispute settlement” system to replace the veto when there is disagreement between the national regulatory authorities and the EU.
“We’d like a better balance to the commission’s responsibilities [and to] those of the new European regulator and the national regulators,” she said.
“We will continue to seek compromises in order to be effective,” she added.
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