Ministers on collision course with MEPs over telecoms proposal

Member states to complete their overview of the European Commission’s telecoms overhaul.

Member states will meet on Tuesday (29 April) to examine potential rules on net neutrality, as they complete their overview of the European Commission’s proposal to overhaul Europe’s telecoms markets. That will open the way to debates on the proposal, and the aim is to present a progress report by June and amendments by September.

Germany and the United Kingdom, which have two of the European Union’s largest telecoms companies – Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone – have already circulated a position paper calling on the other member states to remove large parts of the Commission’s proposal. “Some elements of the [proposal] are complex and present significant challenges to reaching swift agreement,” the paper reads.

But broadly in line with the proposal, the paper advocates setting a clear end date for mobile roaming charges and introducing only some form of net neutrality rules, which aim to ensure that telecoms providers do not manage internet traffic to discriminate against certain internet services.

This approach would set ministers on a collision course with MEPs, who in April backed far stricter net neutrality rules that would prevent any discrimination by telecoms operators between consumer internet traffic and traffic linked to their own business services.

Germany and the UK also argue for removing all the proposal’s provisions on wholesale access products, harmonising spectrum auctions and regulating international calls. “No clear case has been made” in favour of these provisions, nor on several others, according to the two countries. They would also rather see changes made to consumer protection rules by amending existing legislation on universal services.

MEPs voted to end roaming charges by December 2015 and to reduce member states’ control over spectrum auctions, although they also removed key elements of the Commission’s proposal.

Neelie Kroes, the European commissioner for the digital agenda, proposed the rules in September 2013 with the principal aim of closer integration of Europe’s fragmented telecoms market.