Reding on the warpath again (and again)

Not content with threatening operators over their admittedly usurious data/SMS roaming tariffs, Eurocomissar Viv Reding is now allegedly waving a pointed stick at national telecoms regulators for not "liberalising" fast enough.

Judging from this Dow Jones piece, Reding is still adamant on creating a Eurotelco super-regulator, something she's been "suggesting" for a while now. Understandably, national regulators and the telecoms industry are less than ecstatic at the idea - pointing out the virtues of a local regulator for local people - but do they have a choice anymore?

Perhaps. Just to give a bit of background, the problem is that there's no real harmonisation of telecoms regulation across European member states. In the UK, Ofcom has liberalised the market by forcing BT to spin off Openreach, but some other countries' markets are still very much dominated by their incumbents. So, when a company like BT or Deutsche Telekom goes multinational, as is now the case, they find it awfully tricky to offer the same product across European countries.

So there's several options on the table - none of which will please everybody. The so-called "nuclear option" is a super-regulator, which, as we have established, is not wildly popular with anyone. Another option is for the EC itself to gain more powers in overriding national regulators' decisions if it disagrees with them - opinions are mixed on this one.

The third option (favoured, unsurprisingly, by the regulators themselves) is for the European Regulators Group (they must have fun parties, eh?) to "get more teeth" in levelling the playing field amongst its own members. Now, apparently this is what the regulators have put to Reding, and apparently the letter referred to in the Dow Jones piece was less a declaration of war than an invitation to the regulators to convince her of the virtues of the ERG option.

Let's see what happens. This sure as heck ain't over yet...