After trying to agreement on bonuses and discounts, comes a new twist in the battle between the Competition Authority and the telephone companies. The Antitrust announces in a note that it has blocked the tariff increases decided by the telephone companies for the coming months. These are the price increases launched in response to the Authority's decision to prohibit 28-day billing, forcing a return to monthly billing.
Basically, the companies - being forced to issue 12 bills a year instead of 13 - had decided to raise prices to maintain the current economic conditions of the contracts. Even this decision, however, ended up in the sights of the Authority, which stopped the increases to protect consumers.
"At the meeting of 21 March 2018 - reads a note - the Antitrust approved the adoption of precautionary measures as part of the investigation launched last February to ascertain the existence of an agreement between TIM, Vodafone, Fastweb and Wind Tre which, through the trade association Assotelecomunicazioni – Asstel, would have coordinated their commercial strategy related to the frequency of renewals and the invoicing of offers on the fixed and mobile telephony markets”.
The Authority considered that the documentation acquired during the inspections confirms, upon initial examination, "the preliminary hypothesis according to which the parties would have communicated, almost simultaneously, to their customers that the invoicing of offers and services would have been carried out on a monthly basis instead of over four weeks, providing, at the same time, for an increase in the monthly fee to distribute the total annual expense over 12 months, instead of 13. Therefore, in order to avoid the occurrence, pending the conclusion of the proceeding, of serious damage and irreparable for competition and, ultimately, for consumers, the Authority has adopted urgent precautionary measures ordering operators to suspend the implementation of the agreement under investigation and to define their offer of services independently from the own competitors".
