The Council of Ministers of the European Community, meeting in Luxembourg last week committed to a progressively common market in telecommunications products and services, Agence France Presse reports. Despite opposition from the UK, the Netherlands and Denmark, the majority agreed to maintain the right for the na tional PTT to retain the monopoly over the public switched tele phone network on grounds that uneconomic service must be provided to sparsely-populated areas and must needs be subsidised. But competition will be accepted in all value-added services such as the ones that exploit convergence of computing and telecommunica tions. The 12 also agreed to work towards total interconnectivi ty of public networks across the Community, and to principles of tariff harmonisation to reduce the enormous variations in phone charges across the Community. [That’s all very well if the expensive countries have to bring their charges down to the generally cheaper ones in the UK, but not if the cheapest coun tries are required to put their prices up.] The Ministers also agreed to push further towards common standards, with yet another standards body, a European Institute of Telecommunications Stand ardisation, being mooted. There was also accord on liberalising the market for termination equipment and the 12 agreed to define a common position on satellite communications. The meeting wrapped up with agreement on the need to strengthen co-operation in telecommunications research, on presenting a common front in international negotiations, and to help the poorer regions to accede to their rightful place in the telecommunications sun, with a transition period before they need to implement the full rigour of the proposed new regime. But although most members are agreed that the order to liberalise the terminal equipment market is a Good Thing, the French are [rightly, in our view] still concerned that the way it was introduced, by Commission fiat under Article 94 of the Treaty of Rome, sets a dangerous prece dent for rule by decree from Brussels, and may formally protest the ruling. The European telecommunications market is put at over $100,000m a year, 20% of the world market, against 35% for the US and 11% for Japan, but is seen as too fragmented, with no one country accounting for more than 6% of the world market. By the year 2000 it is forecast that generation of 7% of the Gross Domestic Product of the Community will depend on telecommunica tions, against 2% now, and that more than half of all workers in the EC will be affected by new communications methods. Over the next 20 years, too, the total investment in the sector by the 12 is forecast to amount to some $570m or so.
