More than a year into talks on EU e-communications rule reform, ’...

to compromise,” he told a communications and competition law conference in Brussels. Lack of accord on a new regulatory package before the 2009 seating of a new EC and parliamentary elections would mean no reform until the second half of 2011 at the earliest, something neither industry nor consumers need, he said. There are signs of high-level agreement on users’ rights provisions, he said, but other areas remain controversial. One is an EC proposal to give itself veto power over competition conditions imposed by national regulators, he said. A Council of Ministers compromise calls for subjecting individual competition remedies to peer review by an advisory body of regulators, he said. Review could form the basis for an EC recommendation directed at the national authority in question. EU lawmakers rejected the idea of an EC veto for an approach in which the EC could issue a veto if, after peer review, the regulators’ advisory body agreed. It doesn’t allow the EC to issue a binding decision, but the Council version makes it “virtually inconceivable” for a national regulator to proceed with a defective decision once vetted and publicly highlighted, said Richards. If given veto power, the EC must exercise that power as apolitically as it can, he said. National regulators will balk at a system in which the EC is allowed to “aim off from the advice of the regulatory experts in pursuit of some political goal du jour,” he said. Tied to the issue of how to make telecommunications rules more consistent in Europe is the issue of what EU-level body to create to advise the EC, he said. The EC proposal for a full-blown “Euro agency” was “ill-conceived,” and failed to win over the parliament and Council, he said. It’s now seen generally that any such body must have national regulators’ expertise at its heart, with the EC unable to interfere in its output, he said. The entity also must have a well-defined mission and the size to fulfill it, he said. Tentative conclusions are emerging, Richards said. There’s increasing support for a two-tier solution in which the advisory body clearly is the college of regulators, with specific functions hard-wired into the new rules, he said. The agency needs a small, permanent staff, perhaps extrapolated from today’s European Regulators Group secretariat, he said. Political accord on the reform package is complicated by many governments’ belief that the proper balance of power and duties between national bodies and EU institutions was settled in the 2002 rules, Richards said. But collaboration has to improve to manage ties that link the EC, national regulators and governments, so they are “less about banging heads together and more about placing subtle but effective pressure” on countries failing to create liberalized and competitive markets, he said. Regulators have a “real head of steam” now to make rules more consistent, said Richards.