The most fun stories to cover from Brussels are usually those about big, messy fights. And such scraps are all the juicier when Viviane Reding, pugnacious EU telecoms chief, is involved.

For a start, she sparks robust and outspoken responses from the industry.

“Belarus is better for business than Brussels,”a top telecoms executive claimed last week in connection with Reding’s most recent efforts to cut mobile phone fees.

This reminded me of an attack on Reding in 2006, when she revealed legislation to cap lucrative roaming charges: one operator likened the proposal to central planning in the ex-USSR.

Here was Brussels bringing a law that not only commanded popular support but also, rarely, won rave headlines in Europe’s most eurosceptic media. The Luxembourger took on the industry (companies such as Telefonica, Vodafone and more), and won, forcing them to slash the price of overseas mobile calls.

Evidently, the success emboldened her. Victory seems to be everything for Reding, a journalist-turned-politician who outfoxed heavyweight colleagues in the European Commission to pass the legislation.

But now she is fighting on multiple fronts in the fast-moving telecoms sector. With only a year or so left on the legislative timetable before the European parliament’s elections, her battle plan is hard to predict.

At the top of her to-do list is a drive to force operators to cut the fees they charge customers to send text messages and use mobile internet while abroad.

This seems a politically irresistible quest, especially when you see stories like this: “A couple have been hit with a bill of £11,000 after downloading four episodes of the sitcom Friends via a mobile phone.” Some operators have already reduced charges as a result of Reding’s call for action.

At the same time, Reding also seeks to re-write the telcoms rulebook, bigtime. She wants to establish an EU telecoms authority who wants a new EU uber-agency, (but what exactly would it do?) liberalise radio spectrum and boost Brussels’ powers over the telecoms sector. Oh yes, she’s also trying to give national authorities the right to break up some of Europe’s biggest telecoms companies.

Reding wants everything: no wonder the telcoms industry is bridling in response. It’s too early to know what she will win, and what she’ll lose in her quest to leave her mark. But there’ll be fights galore along the way.

March 6th, 2008 in Telecoms | Permalink