ANGA Position on the Commission’s DNA White Paper

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 Commission’s 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 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.