The European Commission is set to announce plans to ease regulation and price controls for Europe's telecommunications industry, the Financial Timesreported today.
The plan, due to be unveiled by the next week, will see the commission outline its intention to free seven of the present 18 telecoms markets from regulation, including markets for providing local, national and international calls to retail customers, the report said.
As a result, national regulators will in future find it much harder to force former monopolies such as Deutsche Telekom to grant rivals access to their networks and tell them what prices to charge.
The deregulation drive is to be presented on June 28th by Viviane Reding, the EU media commissioner, the paper said.
