Activities TILEC in the area of communications law reform

With the European Commission's proposals for changes to the European regulatory framework for electronic communications now on the table, TILEC researchers are very active in the policy and scientific discussions now taking place. Already at the beginning of the year, TILEC presented an extensive contribution to the Commission's call for input. This fall, Pierre Larouche and Maartje de Visser are working on a more fundamental contribution on the relationship between the Commission, the national regulatory authorities and the national courts. The work was presented at a ThinkTel workshop in Brussels on 20 September and at a conference organized by WIK and others in Wroclaw on 19 and 20 October, and will be available as a TILEC DP soon. It will be published on the TILEC website. TILEC members will also be participating in the ENCORE Symposium on the Future of Telecoms Regulation on 2 and 3 November. Alexandre de Streel, a TILEC visitor in 2005, defended a thesis on key aspects of that reform (supervised by Jacques Ziller, Massimo Motta and Pierre Larouche) at the European University Institute on 17 October. Earlier this fall, TILEC held a seminar on network neutrality featuring Prof. Greg Sidak from Georgetown University. Filomena Chirico is presenting her paper on the economic rationale for Internet regulation as part of a session on the state of the art in Internet governance research at the First Annual Symposium of the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet) on 29 October in Athens.