{"id":1800,"date":"2016-12-10T13:09:28","date_gmt":"2016-12-10T13:09:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ratinglegis.eu\/en\/?p=1800"},"modified":"2025-11-18T09:45:14","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T09:45:14","slug":"neutrality-are-incumbents-still-on-the-dark-side","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ratinglegis.eu\/en\/neutrality-are-incumbents-still-on-the-dark-side\/","title":{"rendered":"Neutrality \u2013 definitely my favourite sin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like everyone else in the packed room we much enjoyed the 2nd Chillin\u2019 Competition<\/strong> conference<\/a> on November 21st. The topic of the day was neutrality<\/strong>, which is why t<\/strong>he programme featured the Swiss flag<\/strong>. A symbol that inspired today’s entry (which is not to be taken entirely serious).<\/p>\n

Should someone force us to pick three favourites among a wealth of fine presentations our votes would go to Bill Batchelor, Jos\u00e9 Luis Buend\u00eda and Jorge Padilla\u2026 in alphabetical order. As luck has it, all three put up their slides on the blog\u2019s website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But let us briefly touch upon the words of one of Jos\u00e9 Luis\u2019s fellow panellists and merry tweeter @johnfingleton1<\/strong>. The former head of the Irish Competition Authority and the OFT made his run very wide to bash regulators interfering with competition, which, he said, was \u2018going backwards\u2019 in key markets such as 4G due to \u2018over-regulation<\/a>\u2019.<\/p>\n

When some of us set out to fight the monopolist telecoms dinosaurs<\/a> (known as \u2018telecommunications organisations\u2019 or \u2018TOs<\/strong>\u2019) back in the late 80s, our main goal was clearly to get their market share down. Understandably, as this share was 100%.<\/p>\n

Thirty years on, we wonder is a 40% market share by a TO still a sign of regulatory failure, now by excess, or not simply a reflection of the fact that incumbents started with deeper pockets and stayed in a game marked by a severe capital-drain<\/a><\/strong>, e.g. through spectrum auctions<\/a>. Stayed on sleeker and incomparably more efficient, as it were.<\/p>\n

Also, thinking of John\u2019s push to have BT spin off OpenReach<\/a>, we wonder what remedial effect this might have. Is control over fixed networks<\/strong> still a key driver of competition or, put the other way round, is such control by a TO an obstacle to achieving \u201can inclusive gigabit Europe<\/a>\u201d (whatever that means)? Folks like Timo H\u00f6ttges<\/a> strongly deny this \u2013 but then he would, wouldn\u2019t he. In any event, we do believe that the really bad news for EU telecoms<\/strong> is elsewhere. Here<\/a>, for instance.<\/p>\n

So what about neutrality<\/strong>? Why not look at market dynamics rather than TO market share \u2013 let\u2019s put red rags of the past behind us. Which is what Bar\u00e7a<\/a> fans<\/strong> plead when local football rivals wave the above flag (that reads “go away!”) at them \u2013 as a friendly reminder of the fact that Bar\u00e7a\u2019s founders were British, German and Swiss expats<\/strong> who, being protestants, were not allowed to play in catholic Catalan clubs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like everyone else in the packed room we much enjoyed the 2nd Chillin\u2019 Competition conference on November 21st. The topic of the day was neutrality, which is why the programme […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[730,733,104,751,492,739,556,753,761,731,487,749,752,748,745,738,109,740,729,737,757,744,726,732,746,758,103,735,750,734,754,736,728,742,743,755,760,759,756,741,747,727],"class_list":["post-1800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sin-categoria-en","tag-4g","tag-johnfingleton1","tag-abuse","tag-al-pacino","tag-antitrust","tag-barca","tag-big-data","tag-bt","tag-capital-drain","tag-chillin-competition","tag-competition-law","tag-conference","tag-devils-advocate","tag-digital-services","tag-etno","tag-europe","tag-european-commission","tag-fc-barcelona","tag-fixed-networks","tag-gigabit","tag-high-speed","tag-hottges","tag-incumbents","tag-john-fingleton","tag-liberalisation","tag-mobile","tag-monopoly","tag-networks","tag-neutrality","tag-oft","tag-openreach","tag-ott","tag-overregulation","tag-protestant","tag-red-rag","tag-remedy","tag-spectrum","tag-spectrum-auction","tag-spin-off","tag-swiss","tag-telecoms","tag-tos"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ratinglegis.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ratinglegis.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ratinglegis.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ratinglegis.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ratinglegis.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1800"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/ratinglegis.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1857,"href":"https:\/\/ratinglegis.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800\/revisions\/1857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ratinglegis.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ratinglegis.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ratinglegis.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}