By Reuters
Portugal wants to create a European Union telecoms regulator during its six-month EU presidency starting in July, the public works minister, Mario Lino, said on Wednesday.
Lino said he planned to work on a new regulatory framework for the EU telecoms sector in order to tackle new developments in digital television, roaming and the use of common EU-wide telephone numbers for various services.
“These are important dossiers for the future of the sector that include relevant issues such as the creation of a European regulator and the way this regulator interacts with other national regulators,” Lino told journalists after a conference.
“These are our priorities during the presidency.”
The comments are likely to find favour in Brussels, which wants a more efficient application of EU telecoms rules in order to boost cross-border competition in the sector and bring down prices for consumers.
But European regulators are divided over how much power the European Regulators Group (ERG), an EU advisory body made up of member state telecom watchdogs, should have in the union’s changing telecoms sector.
Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding has repeatedly said that telecom rules are not applied evenly across the 27 member states and has suggested that more power be handed to a beefed-up version of the ERG.
But some regulators have been more hesitant to empower the ERG for fear that their autonomy may be compromised. The ERG said in February it believed it could do more to achieve consistency under the existing legal framework.
Reding is due to unveil proposals to reform the EU’s telecoms laws and has strongly hinted she wants steps taken towards having a US-style Federal Communications Commission.
The European Commission, which polices EU rules, also wants more powers to enforce “remedies” or requests from Brussels to an EU state to change how it applies the bloc’s rules.
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