Tech Sovereignty Commissioner Henna Virkkunen appeared significantly less favourable to deregulating the telecommunications market than the official stance Commission senior officials have been promoting for months, in an interview with Euractiv on 27 May.
The main point of contention is the potential for deregulation — i.e. dropping protections against abuse of a dominant position — a direction recommended by several reports, but challenged by others. EU telecom lobbies have been hanging on Virkkunen’s every word for at least a year and a half, in a bid to decipher what the sector’s rules review, dubbed the Digital Networks Act (DNA), will entail.
“Not only size matters”, she said, contradicting her senior Commission officials who have been repeating for months that telecom operators’ “size matters” to compete against peers at the global stage and invest in future best in class 5G/6G and fibre-optic networks.
“Many small companies can be very innovative and very competitive,” she added — a statement likely to be music to the ears of many industry players who have recently complained about being sidelined by her, fearing she might lean too heavily toward the largest industry players due to their intense lobbying efforts.
Another sign that Virkkunen may be softening the Commission’s stance on telecom deregulation is her deliberate avoidance of the term itself. Instead, she said she wanted to simplify existing rules to make “Europe easier and faster for businesses.”
But that was about as far as she went in conceding ground. Virkkunen quickly reiterated that the telecom sector “is lacking investments” — a point frequently cited by senior Commission officials to justify a deregulatory approach.
However, when asked about the fact that alternative operators are likely investing more in next-generation connectivity networks than traditional incumbents — raising concerns that deregulation could actually harm private investment in future infrastructure — Virkkunen notably refrained from defending the legacy operators. This marked a clear departure from the position of her predecessor, Thierry Breton, and her own Commission officials in recent months.
She chose to dodge the nitty-gritty question of whether she supports or opposes the Commission’s continued designation of ex ante telecommunications sub-markets in cases of identified market failure at the EU level — a core issue in the current deregulation battle. She instead said, without conviction, that the market needs process simplification.
Faced with the reality that any move to deregulate would surely face opposition from the Council of the EU, the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications, and — based on a daring speculation of a potential own-initiative report — the European Parliament as well, she stated that she wants the Commission telecom review to be “an ambitious proposal, but one that gets support from both the Member States and the Parliament.”
“The Digital Networks Act is going to be the biggest digital legislation the Commission will propose this year,” she concluded.
(nl)
