This winter, the global telecommunications sector is active as never before. On November 24, Europe voted on its new Telecoms Package, a set of Directives that will serve as Europe’s future network policy. The U.S. is revising its own broadband policy at the same time, commissioning Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society to compile a study on the current global broadband trends. This fortunate conjuncture of regulatory overhauls both provides a clear vista of where we are heading to in terms of telecommunications, and highlights important differences between the U.S. and Europe, offering lessons, examples and alternatives to both sides of the Atlantic.

The EU’s approach is clearly consumer driven, and reasonably so. European countries strove hard to instill competition in the telecommunications sector over the past 20 years, and, having succeeded, they can now shift their attention to enhancing the consumer experience. This did not stop the EU from taking further action to increase competition, facilitating functional separation of national telecoms, requiring more independent national authorities, overseeing national regulatory remedies proposed by national regulators and reallocating spectrum. To achieve uniform application of these rules, the EU will establish a new oversight authority, the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC).

But the new directives will also gravely change the lives of millions of network users directly. The EU will officially embrace a form of network neutrality: national telecom authorities will set a minimum quality level for all services, while network management allows more demanding types of applications to take up the necessary bandwidth. Customers will also receive  transparency in the form of better information on what services they subscribe to and what they can or cannot do with those communications services. A requirement that obliges all website operators to ask permission before installing almost any kind of cookie on the user’s computer is another step towards consumer protection, but this privacy provision is so strict that has attracted negative criticism. Finally, European consumers will also be able to change their fixed or mobile phone operator in one working day while keeping their old phone number (it currently takes, on average, nine).

[continued]  The Harvard Law Record – U.S. can learn from EU telecom reforms.