Pro-Liberalisers urge more vigilance from national regulators
National regulators need to be more zealous in applying the 2002 postal services directive, the pro-liberalisation Free and Fair Post Initiative (FFPI) says. “The current situation is far from satisfactory in most member states” as anti-trust probes are “especially rare”, FFPI president Philippe Bodson said in a recent open letter to the European Commission. He wants regulators to pay more attention to price-fixing and cross-subsidisation, the practice where postal operators use profits made in the monopolised sector to fund parts of its business competing on the open market. Mr Bodson said the Commission’s “track record in this field is encouraging” and urged it to continue actively investigating anti-competitive behaviour.
The FFPI chief, who speaks for users and competitors of public postal operators, slammed the EU’s current gradualist approach to opening up the postal market, claiming it “has not produced significant competition”. Mr Bodson accused the member states of breaching the 2002 postal directive by monopolising more of the market than necessary to provide a universal postal service. He wants to see a clearer definition of “universal service obligation” and full market opening by the end of 2009 at the latest. Directive 2002/39/EC is unclear on this, merely requiring the Commission table a proposal in 2006 to complete liberalisation by 2009 “if appropriate”. Any such move would need approval of both the European Parliament and EU Council of Ministers. Presently, only ordinary domestic and outgoing cross-border mail weighing more than 100g is open to competition, with the threshold falling to 50g on January 1, 2006.
