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Roaming: “Seek not excess”

Posted on June 29, 2007 | Filed Under communication technologies 

Today, the Roaming Regulation, pride of the European Commission’s ad hoc-regulation efforts, was published in the Official Journal - so tomorrow, when the Regulation enters into force, the walls will come tumbling down as “the last border in Europe’s internal market” (copyright: Viviane Reding) will finally be abolished.

In fact, things might well be less spectacular, since the regulation in effect boils down to old-style price-regulation (on the retail and wholesale level, € 0.49 and 0.30 per minute resp. in the first year - for details see Art 3 and 4 of the Regulation), dressed up in new-style rhetoric (to avoid the term newspeak).

A complex mechanism involving NRAs, operators and customers will offer options, choices, transparency, and a few other buzzwords, so that everyone - NRAs, operators and customers - is kept busy, and by the end of the day “community-wide roaming” will have become cheaper in the course of August this year, the exact time depending on how the operators (and to some extent the customers) will act, and also depending somewhat on how the NRAs will interpret the regulation (some indication of the ERG’s position here).

Following the example of Advocate General Dámaso Ruiz-Jarabo Colomer, whose opinions regularly include literary quotes (for instance: Proust in C-64/06, Zola in C-195/06, Cervantes in C-262/06), I have recently started to quote Shakespeare here on this blog - but Shakespeare might not be the best source for quotes concerning the Roaming Regulation - still, here is Shakespeare on Roaming:

• O mistress mine, where are you roaming? (Twelfth Night)
• Five summers have I spent in furthest Greece,
  Roaming clean through the bounds of Asia (Comedy of Errors)
• Daphne roaming through a thorny wood (The Taming of the Shrew)

However, I did find a rather interesting quote on roaming in the (once) famous poem “The Golden Journey to Samarkand” by James Elroy Flecker (quoted here from my 1972 version of the The New Oxford Book of English Verse):

“Seek not excess: God hateth him who roams”

The setting, by the way, is Bagdad, and the travellers - as the poem’s title promises - are heading off towards Samarkand (now in Uzbekistan). Neither Iraq nor Uzbekistan, of course, are affected by the Roaming Regulation - and, according to my provider’s website, as of today I would be charged € 4.40 (Uzbekistan) or € 4.20 (Iraq) for a one minute roaming-call from there.

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