The European Commission yesterday duly called for total deregulation of telephone service in the European Community by 1998 and asked telecommunications ministers to endorse that goal at their Council of Ministers on May 10: the UK is the only European Community country where the body responsible for installing phones and running the service has been forced to make room for a competitor, but national territorial monopolies were not suited to the needs of a single Community market and technological advances meant they were no longer justified in any case, the Commission said; Industry Commissioner Martin Bangemann said the Commission would soon produce another paper on whether development of telephone networks should also be dealt with under a free market system, adding that the Commission believed companies from outside the Community should be free to reap the benefits of deregulation as long as EC firms were able to do likewise on those firms’ home territory; but the Commission pulled back from recommending that large companies be free to lease spare capacity on the networks of utilities such as gas from the start of next year.
