The climate around the single network project is heating up, approved - at least in its framework - by Tim and Cdp. While Mediaset takes time to make his assessments on whether or not to participate in the project and Tim's CEO Luigi Gubitosi is not very enthusiastic about the possible entry of broadcasters, the Financial Times decisively rejects the approach that the government wanted to give to the new infrastructure initiative. And above all, after an initial wait, he takes the field Vodafone Group CEO Nick Read who bought a space in the online newspaper Politico to publish his speech with a very clear title: “Digital infrastructure must look to the future and not to the past”.
"The Italian telecommunications industry has always swum against the tide" in the EU, writes FT, referring to the fact that the plan to merge the two networks of Open Fiber and Tim (via Fiber Cop) has been announced "effectively recreating a supplier of monopolistic broadband”. "While telecommunications companies in other parts of Europe have spent twenty years complaining that regulators and governments are obsessed with promoting competition," observes the newspaper from London, the Italian government is going in the opposite direction. And again: “They are designing the perfect suicide for the fiber and recreating a monster”.
Read also for further information Tim and Cdp, ok to the single network. FiberCop is born.
Telecom Italia's desire to secure a majority in the "new AccessCo network", wanted by the government to speed up the laying of the optical fiber, has "irritated" some of its rivals, says the City newspaper reported in Italy by Ansa. “Tiscali and Fastweb have supported the single network – continues the comment – but others have expressed their views the alarm that the agreement will undermine the progress made by Italy in leading the competition and investment".
Among the latter, it can now be included the intervention of Nick Read on Politico. “Digital infrastructures must look forward, not backwards, e monopolies and forced competition are bad for consumers“, reports Ansa. Read also extends the tour to Portugal and the Czech Republic but with regard to Italy he writes that "the government is trying to recreate that monopoly in the landline that previous governments and European institutions had dismantled over time". The "consolidation" between Telecom and Open Fiber would leave the other providers "with only a seller of wholesale access to the network, that is, Telecom Italia again. OpenFiber customers, including Vodafone, would have to compete against Telecom Italia's broadband offerings with no option but to buy wholesale access from them,” continues Read. "Creating any form of competition in Italy has been notoriously difficult, only with the creation of Open Fiber a few years ago did Italy begin to modernize its fixed networks", therefore "theReversing a failed monopoly model can't be a good thing neither for competition nor for investments, and goes against four decades of anti-monopoly policies and EU laws”, says the CEO of Vodafone.
Vodafone's entry into the field, in particular, brings the theme of the single network and its developments back to the table of the EU Antitrust. Tim's CEO Luigi Gubitosi explained, in a press conference in Cernobbio last weekend, that the governance of the new company it will guarantee a strong control power to CDP and which will, in this sense, be independent. That of governance and the weights of the various operators in the capital of the single network will be a crucial junction for the success of AccessCo which will in any case have to obtain the go-ahead from the competition guarantor: European or even Italian if the EU decides to postpone the dossier to Rome.
