WRITTEN QUESTION P-1806/99

by Paul Rübig (PPE-DE) to the Commission

(11 October 1999)

Subject: Cross-border direct dispatch of national telephone directories

The International Telecommunication Union is a Europe-wide association of telecommunications undertakings. It recommends to participants wishing to obtain a telephone directory for a specific Member State that they apply to the administration of their own country. Many administrative departments accept this recommendation from a non-governmental and non-Community institution and supply their respective telephone directories only within their own national borders.

How does the Commission assess this procedure against the background of the liberalisation of the telecommunications sector and of the incipient internal market in telecommunications?

Can it avert the suspicion that competition and/or anti-discrimination legislation is being breached here?

Answer given by Mr Liikanen on behalf of the Commission

(5 November 1999)

The Honourable Member's question relates to the conditions on which the national regulatory authorities in the Member States apply the relevant provisions of Directive 98/0010/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 February 1998 on the application of open network provision (ONP) to voice telephony and on universal service for telecommunications in a competitive environment(1).

This Directive does, in fact, lay down in Article 15 (2) that (subject to compliance with the legislation on the protection of personal data) Member States shall take all necessary measures to remove any regulatory restrictions which prevent provision of the services and facilities listed in Annex I, part 3, in compliance with the competition rules of Community law. The list in Annex I, part 3 includes, under points e) and f), access to operator services in other Member States and access to directory enquiry services in other Member States.

The Honourable Member's description of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and its procedures dates back to the time (prior to the Community's introduction of a regulatory framework to liberalise the telecommunications sector) when the ITU effectively represented a group of national administrations which were in charge of telecommunications within the context of public monopolies. In the meantime, there have been changes in the ITU's structures to reflect the increasing, and ever more widespread, distinction between telecommunications operators and the regulatory authorities in this field.

This distinction has gradually been imposed in Europe, particularly through the policy of liberalisation, eliminating the exclusive and special rights enjoyed by traditional operators, and this has led to the regulatory framework adopted by the Community enshrining the principle of separating the national regulator from the traditional operator. Nowadays, both the national administrations and the economic operators in the ITU Member States are involved in this work, but Community regulations now oblige the Member States' administrations to act completely independently of the interests of all the categories of operators who may contribute to the work of the ITU.

It should also be noted that, as their name suggests, the recommendations issued by the ITU do not have any directly binding legal force, and may only therefore be followed by the Member States insofar as they do not conflict with the Community legislation in force.

Finally, the Commission has no information at this stage to suggest that the ITU's recommendations either counteract or facilitate the effective application, by the relevant authorities in the Member States, of the aforementioned provisions in Directive 98/0010/EC.

(1) OJ L 101, 1.4.1998.