The Body of European Regulators in Electronic Communications is seeking...
The Body of European Regulators in Electronic Communications is seeking comment on non-discrimination principles it plans to include in updated common positions on wholesale unbundled access, wholesale broadband access and wholesale leased lines (http://xrl.us/bmwkut). The concept of non-discrimination is an…
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important regulatory tool to ensure operators have a level playing field in the market, BEREC said. It generally aims to ensure that conditions set by companies with significant market power (SMP) don’t discriminate against their rivals in favor of their own downstream businesses, hampering competition, it said. So the chief consideration under a general non-discrimination requirement is to make sure SMP players treat all those seeking access, whether domestic or foreign, the same way unless there are objective reasons for not doing so, it said. National telecom regulators should use the principle of equivalence in dealing with competition problems, it said. That can be done by seeking to achieve either an equivalence of outputs or inputs, it said. The ultimate decision is for national authorities, who must consider the particular competition problems they face and the cost/benefit analysis, it said. Regulators should consider functional separation (splitting a provider’s network arm from its retail branch) only where all other regulatory conditions have failed, it said. They should also put systems in place to prevent SMP companies from not making wholesale offers to competitors in time to allow them to offer new downstream services at the same time as the major player, it said. Other proposed principles include ensuring that alternative providers have the ability to influence the decision about characteristics of new wholesale products and interfaces; and imposing generic requirements on SMP companies to provide service level agreements and guarantees, and key performance indicators. Comments are due March 30 to pm@berec.europa.eu.