Eu Telecommunications Regulation Enlightenment

For a long time, people regard telecom industry as an industry of natural monopoly; they think that telecom has the characteristics of basic service, integrity of network, sunk of cost, and scope economy, so the monopoly mode is suitable to this industry. Many countries established monopoly system of telecom by legislation, law or system. Because f monopoly may bring loss to social welfare, so the telecom enterprises must be regulated to satisfy the efficiency standard and the needs of social benefit. Therefore, the development of telecom industry is followed by the conflict of monopoly and competition, and also has a close relation with regulation.Since the nineteen eighties, with the development of telecom techniques, the telecom industry is changing greatly. The telecom industry is entering competition stage after experiencing natural monopoly stage. To comply with this change, most countries are reforming their telecom industry by the way of separation of enterprise from administration, demutualization and privatization of state-owned enterprise, relaxation of regulation, introduction of new competitors, and opening to the outside world. In the trend of world telecom reform, under the direction of EU committee, the EU members began a reform of promote state-owned telecom enterprises and government regulation system through legislation.At the early stage of breaking monopoly and introducing competition, unlike the American reform of split AT&T, EU chose a more moderate way, its main characteristics are: maintain the former state-owned leader telecom enterprises to deal with kinds of telecom operation; demutualize and privatize the leader telecom enterprises, and give out a new lot of business certificate; the government regulates the leader telecom enterprises by legislation, and introduces competition by supporting new competitors, thus creates a fair competition environment. Only in several years, there appeared a lot of international leader telecom enterprises that deal with all kinds of business, such as Deutch Telecom, Britain Telecom and France Telecom. After a period of fast development and restrictions, the telecom industry of China is facing a transform from natural monopoly to competition, from closed to opening, from disorder to order. Therefore, there are many problems need to be solved.This paper uses the methods of theory analysis, demonstration research and comparison research, discusses the theories and practice of telecom regulation. This paper comprises five parts: the analysis of regulation theories; discuss the characteristics of EU telecom regulation; summarize the regulation experiences of Britain and Germany; discover the problems in the regulation system of China, and propose corresponding advices.