Germany’s telecommunications regulator was wrong to make alternat...
Germany’s telecommunications regulator was wrong to make alternative operators pay Deutsche Telekom an additional connection charge as compensation for the deficit it incurred by providing the local loop, the European Court of Justice said Friday. The case involved a…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
challenge by Arcor, Communication Services TELE2 and Firma 01051 Telekom against regulator BNetzA. The regulator approved DT’s request for an additional connection fee July through November 2003, of 0.004 euro a minute for providing calls originating on its network to operators with interconnection contracts, the court said. The basis was that BT’s provision of the local loop was running at deficit, the ECJ said. The decision was thrown out in 2005, and all the parties appealed to the Federal Administrative Court, which sought a preliminary ruling on the issue. The ECJ said that DT’s supplemental interconnection fee, like the charges set by its interconnection agreements, must be based on actual costs -- barring the regulator from approving a tariff that wasn’t cost-based. And it said the charge allowed DT to be reimbursed by the subscribers of other operators’ interconnected networks, a violation of free competition principle. The effect of the supplemental fee was to protect the dominant player by keeping the cost for calls of its own subscribers below the actual cost and so to finance its own deficit, the ECJ said. The dispute shows how long rate decisions in Germany wend through the courts, said telecommunications lawyer Axel Spies. The German courts now must decide how much competitive carriers have been overcharged, he said. - DS