The telecoms package in the Official Journal

Posted on December 18, 2009 | Filed Under communication technologies

This is just to alert you to the EU Official Journal of today with the publication of the new telecoms package. Here are the links:

In addition to the regulation and the directives there is also the Commission Decision 2009/978/EU of 16 December 2009 amending Decision 2002/622/EC establishing a Radio Spectrum Policy Group and the Commission declaration on net neutrality (which is also published as an addendum to the directive 2009/140/EC).

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An encouraging obligation? HFSS food and drink advertising and codes of conduct under the Audiovisual Media Services Directive

Posted on December 10, 2009 | Filed Under national regulatory authorities, events / publications

One of the more recent arrivals on the scene of regulatory concern for audiovisual policymakers and supervisory bodies is the promotion of unhealthy foodstuffs to children which may have adverse effects on their physiological well-being and development. As one among several factors feeding the development of childhood obesity as part of a wider obesity epidemic (information from the World Health Organization), marketing practices have increasingly come under scrutiny and regulatory authorities as well as elected representatives have directed their attention toward the issue. In Europe, already before the process of revising the regulatory framework for television broadcasting had come under way, countries like the UK were therefore considering regulatory action to address the endangerment of public health by food and drink advertising notably of products that are high in fat or salt or sugar (HFSS) (for a summary of the evidence to which UK Government policy responded in 2003, see this note by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology; for recent UK evidence regarding child obesity, see here and here).

With the adoption of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, the diverse initiatives at the national level were complemented by a general European framework provision on advertising of unhealthy food and drink set out in Article 3e (2) AVMSD [the ‘food provision’] stipulating that

Member States and the Commission shall encourage media service providers to develop codes of conduct regarding inappropriate audiovisual commercial communication, accompanying or included in children’s programmes, of foods and beverages containing nutrients and substances with a nutritional or physiological effect, in particular those such as fat, trans-fatty acids, salt/sodium and sugars, excessive intakes of which in the overall diet are not recommended.

The obligation thus made incumbent on the Commission and the Member States is similar to that of Article 3c of the new Directive, which requires national authorities to encourage providers to increase accessibility of their services to users with a hearing or visual disability. While both provisions target very tangible characteristics of both linear and non-linear audiovisual media services, the nature of the obligations that they impose inevitably leads to questions about their likely effectiveness. Read more

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author: Oliver Fueg | Permalink | | Print This Article | Leave a Comment

“Thus hath the course of justice wheel’d about”*: decided cases

Posted on December 3, 2009 | Filed Under communication technologies

Today marks the end of the “regulatory holidays”, as the Court of Justice of the European Union decided (in the Case C-424/07 Commission v. Germany) that Germany has failed to fulfil its obligations under Article 8(4) of the Access Directive, Articles 6 to 8(1) and (2), 15(3) and 16 of the Framework Directive, and Article 17(2) of the Universal Service Directive, by adopting Paragraph 9a of the Law on Telecommunications. Under this paragraph, Germany had effectively declared “regulatory holidays” for “new markets” (more details here). I have blogged about the case before here and on the opinion of the advocate general here.

The Court’s judgment is rather straightforward and a very thorough vindication of the Commission’s position. The Court deals with and upholds every single complaint of the Commission and concludes that the German law did indeed restrict the NRA’s discretion more than is permitted by the Framework Directive (and also contravenes the Access and Universal Service Directive).

Today also marks the end of the blogging holidays: after a hiatus of some five months I have decided not to close the blog down completely, but to continue with a lighter schedule and just focus on following the case law developments in European electronic communications. So don’t expect frequent posts, but keep subscribed to the feed if you are interested in the cases decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union (new name - but I guess I can still abbreviate it as ECJ) and the General Court of the European Union (formerly known as Court of First Instance of the European Communities - I have no idea how to abbreviate this Court correctly, so I just started using “GC”).

I have updated the list of pending cases and added a new list of decided cases, linking not only to the judgments, but also to the blog posts here (or, if I didn’t write about the case here, to the blog posts at my German language blog e-comm).

And just as a brief update, I can point you to these cases decided over the past five months:

New opinions of the advocate general are available in these cases:

*) Shakespeare, King Richard III, Act IV, Scene 4

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