ECTA, the European Competitive Telecommunications Association, welcomes the European Commission’s Digital Single Market (DSM) Strategy and congratulates it on the robust political vision that effective competition is key to the deployment of high performance and affordable digital highways. ECTA supports the recognition by the European Commission that a strong, competitive and dynamic telecoms sector is needed to carry out the necessary investments and to exploit innovation.
The CEOs of ECTA member companies also welcome and congratulate the European Commission for its Digital Single Market Strategy and outline their vision of the way forward in an open letter (click here).
Erzsébet Fitori, Director of ECTA stressed that “regulation should be adapted and improved to the challenges beyond 2020, bearing in mind that vibrant competition is the best way to explore our digital future . We need a fit for purpose regulatory framework, which focuses on enduring bottlenecks. Europe will only get a triple A rating if its policies ensure Access to high speed networks for all Europeans at Affordable prices and promote Agile players that compete on the merits: innovation, quality and speeds.”
Hubertus von Roenne, Chairman of ECTA emphasised that the EU’s economy needs competitors to be able to challenge incumbents. European regulation should therefore have a zero tolerance policy for monopolies, and duopolies1 in the digital economy be they new or old. This is the only way to enable the emergence of a ‘European Google’ or tomorrow’s ‘killer app’.”
In ECTA’s forward looking vision, in the telecom landscape of 2020 and beyond regulatory certainty for all should have been created by focusing on building a single market for cross border services and improving competitive conditions locally for local and global services. ECTA supports the vision of the Digital Single Market as the land of fair competition, where regulation enables newcomers to challenge the incumbents for the benefits of end-users.