THE PROMOTION OF INVESTMENTS IN NEW MARKETS IN ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS AND THE ROLE OF NATIONAL REGULATORY AUTHORITIES AFTER COMMISSION V GERMANY

摘要

The judgment of 3 December 2009 in Commission v Germany touches upon the issue of improper implementation by a Member State (Germany) of the EU regulatory framework in the electronic communications sector. In this sense, the judgment in question belongs to the relatively large group of rulings in which the European Court of Justice (ECJ) categorizes the legislative actions (or inactions) of Member States in the field of electronic communications as infringing the Union secondary legislation. Undoubtedly, however, Commission v Germany constitutes a judgment that is of paramount importance within the above-mentioned group of rulings and deserves a particularly close attention. Being confronted here with the German rules that generally exempted the so-called new (emerging) markets in the sector concerned from ex ante regulation, the Court had an opportunity to express its views on such key regulatory issues as.