Using telecom law offers fundamental advantages over competition law to remedy monopolised ICT market sectors and in eGovernment initiatives, says Felix Greve, a German lawyer specialised in IT-law. In November, Greve summarised his July 2015 PhD thesis in a webinar organised for the European Commission’s ‘Open Standards for ICT Procurement’ project.
“Telecommunication regulation enables private competition and lets private competition sort out which specific standard technology shall be used, instead of stipulating technologies for eGovernment initiatives and instead of retroactively correcting ICT markets”, he said.
Government telecom law is so far ignored in the political debate on ICT standards.
The lawyer argues that regulating ICT standards is no different from overseeing standards for television sets. European governments have mandated the interoperability of television networks and TV sets, and they should do the same for the rest of the telecom infrastructure. “The use of open ICT standards for digital information is a mandatory consequence of the government’s telecom infrastructure obligations”, Greve said.
Governmental obligation
“When vendor specific information for encoding TV threatened to monopolize the marked, European-wide regulation specified joint vendor independent standards for data formats, cryptographic methods and even programming interfaces”, Greve said on 27 November. “That prevented monopolization, and blocked vendor specific standards.”
The primary condition for open competition in the telecommunication sector is that there is access to all competitors. This is an inevitable governmental obligation, says Greve.
The 30 minute-webinar did not give Greve time to detail his arguments on open ICT standards. “Politicians should consider to demand license terms which are comparable to free software licenses.”
Greve published his dissertation in July.