ABSTRACT
For more than a century, a strong consensus prevailed in Western Europe on the provision of telecommunications services as the exclusive responsibility of nation states and the joint provision of international services by the national PTT administrations. Domestic governments stipulated the industry’s relevant market conditions, socio-economic issues and trade policy The state empowered the PTT with a statutory or de facto monopoly and supported the domestic equipment industry through R&D funding, public procurement contracts and export subsidies. The influence of other stakeholders in the telecommunications domain (such as computing firms, large business users and consumers) on policy formulation was restricted. Today’s telecommunications has become a market-driven industry, in which the European national economies, regional trading blocs, public operators, service providers and multinational corporate users are more and more integrated into one global market. The established governance regime has been put under pressure by techno-economic and political-institutional forces. New technologies like cellular radio, cable networks and satellites have effectively challenged the traditional public monopoly. Multinational business users, demanding low-cost, high-quality and one-stop shopping telecommunications services, have successfully lobbied for more flexible and customised facilities from the national PTTs and a more integrated and harmonised European regulatory framework, in which the operational and administrative tasks of the PTTs become disentangled. The internationalisation of leading American telecommunications and computing businesses, together with the general retreat of the interventionist state across Western Europe, has made the national public monopoly regime even more obsolete.
