The Relationship between Competition Law and Sector Specific Regulation : The Case of Electronic Communications

This paper studies the convergence and the remaining divergences of European competition and sector regulation in the electronic communications sector. It shows that (1) antitrust authorities are justified to intervene more intensively in the electronic communications sector than in the other sectors of the economy; (2) the remaining divergences between antitrust and sector regulation should determine the scope of later, hence sector regulation should be applied when there are structural (economic or legal) entry barriers or network effects; (3) contrary to the European practice, it is better to base sector regulation on an independent economic concept linked to the objectives of regulation (like the concept of “bottleneck”); (4) NRAs should be cautious not to automatically extend a regulatory approach suited for infrastructures laid down under legal monopoly conditions to new Schumpeterian infrastructures and should be less hypocritical about their actions