Personal Comments

While the report is certainly useful and constitutes an important step toward the shaping of a european policy for networking, here are some critical remarks on the document:

• the document is ambiguous on the issue of deregulation: it mentions several times the fact that tariffs are too high and should be reduced, therefore assuming regulated tariffs, while pushing somewhere else for liberalisation of the market. A sentence like "adjustment of tariffs is required by a competitive environment" is strange: if the environment is competitive, tariffs will adjust accordingly, if tariffs are not appropriate, then the environment is not competitive.
• the document has a strong bias toward industry, forgetting that networking will have significant impact on culture. See the recent vote against the concentration media in various countries by the Commission on Culture of the EU.
• the recommendation that the funding be left to the private sector is also questionable, but no argumentation on the issue is presented nor it is considered subject of debate. While this is clearly the position of the US administation, where networking technology is quite further advanced than in Europe, it is questioniable whether this is the apppropriate solution for Europe, where technology has still to achieve a critical level of diffusion and availability.
• pushing ISDN technology is questionable. ISDN would have made sense 10 years ago: many experts in the field consider ISDN "too little, too late".

On the other hand the following proposals are commendable:

• establishment of European Authority: currently several countries have no regulation authority and sometimes they delegate regulation to the monopolist PTT, which is a clear nonsense.
• in a more recent report, Bangemann has suggested that liberalisation in the telecom sector could be done immediately, rather than according to the lengthy gradual approach so far decided by the EU. This will have positive effects both on the consumers and the providers, as the experience in US and UK has demonstrated.