Bologna: Engineers pulling copper out of Emilia-Romagna exchanges are working ahead of a law that has not passed yet. The Digital Networks Act, proposed by the European Commission on 21 January, would repeal and replace much of the existing telecommunications rulebook, and the copper-to-fibre transition is one of the few parts that operators genuinely want accelerated.
The proposal is unusually broad. It covers spectrum management, satellite authorisation, network resilience and cybersecurity duties, consumer protection provisions and cross-border market access, and it converts a directive-based framework into a regulation. That last shift carries most of the political weight, because a regulation applies directly and strips national regulators of the transposition discretion they have used for two decades to tailor rules to local market structures.
Parliament’s industry committee leads the file, with the Polish Renew member Michał Kobosko as rapporteur, and the internal market and civil liberties committees associated. Council working parties have been grinding through the text since spring. Nobody expects a first-reading deal soon, and telecom operators planning capital expenditure through 2030 are treating the proposal as a signal rather than a schedule.
The most watched fight ended before it started. Network fees, the long-running demand that large content platforms contribute to infrastructure costs, did not survive into the proposal. What did survive is a voluntary conciliation mechanism for disputes over internet protocol interconnection, supervised by national regulatory authorities. Platform lobbyists read that mechanism as a foot in the door, arguing that a voluntary process with a regulator in the room becomes mandatory in practice. Operators counter that interconnection disputes currently have no European forum at all.
Consolidation sits underneath everything. European telecoms markets carry far more operators than the United States or China, and the Commission has hinted for years that scale would fund investment. The proposal does not rewrite merger control, which belongs to competition rules, but a single authorisation framework and harmonised spectrum conditions would lower the practical cost of operating across borders. Consumer organisations regard that as the reform’s real purpose and warn that fewer operators historically means higher retail prices.
Copper switch-off deadlines worry a different constituency. Setting a European date disciplines operators who would otherwise maintain legacy networks indefinitely, but rural households and small businesses on copper lines depend on a fibre or fixed wireless alternative arriving first. Several Member States have asked for flexibility clauses, and rural municipalities in Italy, Spain and Poland have raised the same point through their regional representations.
Spectrum harmonisation may prove the hardest chapter. Radio frequencies are a national asset, auctioned by national treasuries, and several finance ministries treat auction revenue as a budget line. Longer licence durations and coordinated assignment conditions make commercial sense for operators building continental networks, and they reduce the leverage a government holds over its own airwaves.
The Commission argues that fragmentation costs Europe more than any single rule. Critics answer that consolidating twenty-seven markets into one legal space does not create demand, and that the investment gap reflects thin returns rather than regulatory friction. Both arguments will be tested in the negotiations that resume this autumn.
