EU policy for next generation access - an innovative or incremental step forward?

The EU Commission published a second, substantially revised, version of the draft recommendation for the regulation of next generation access networks for public consultation in June 2009. The Recommendation includes a large set of regulatory tools suitable for the emerging NGA environment. This second draft takes into account a large number of comments received in response to a previous EU Commission document of autumn 2008 dealing with the same topic, but with different focal points. The research question discussed in this paper is whether the revised Draft Recommendation is consistent with the current regulatory framework, i.e. whether the approach is an incremental step complementing the existing regulation, or whether the Recommendation lays the foundation for a new and innovative regulatory strategy in the EU. The conclusion of the paper is that the EU Commission aims to continue and further develop current regulation, and that the development of access regulation will remain dynamic, but at the cost of simplicity and straight-forwardness. This approach will test the current regulatory regime's ability to adapt to changes in technology and economic parameters and flexibility to deal with both legacy as well as new networks.