Mr. Peter Scott
Head of Unit, Policy Development,
DG Information Society and Media,
European Commission,
Avenue de Beaulieu XX,
B-1160 Brussels
Dear Mr Scott,
We are writing to you with regard to the confusion which we face
concerning the Voice over the Internet Protocol (VOIP) providers’
obligations vis à vis universal service.
In particular, the Universal Service Directive 2002/22/EC in Art. 5
stipulates that there shall be at least one universal directory per Member
State containing all subscribers’ listings on paper or electronic format.
Furthermore, in order to ensure the comprehensiveness of the listings for
directories, this Directive also prescribes in Art. 25 paragraph 2 that:
“Member States shall ensure that all undertakings which assign telephone
numbers to subscribers meet all reasonable requests to make available, for
the purposes of publicly available directory enquiry services and
directories, the relevant information in an agreed format on terms which
are fair, objective, cost oriented and non-discriminatory.”
However, the recent European Commission’s Q&A communication on the VOIP
issue states that:
“It favours a rather “light touch” approach, as it believes it is the best
way to encourage competition between the internet carriers of telephone
traffic and traditional telephone networks. In general EC wants to ensure
that the new IP-based services are not hindered by legislative burdens.”
If this is the case, it would appear that the VOIP service providers are
not embraced by the scope of the Universal Service Directive and obliged
by art.25 of the Directive to provide their subscribers’ numbers to the
directory publishers. This in turn would seriously endanger the
comprehensiveness of directories which is the key instrument for European
citizens and the right of end-users. It is therefore vitally important to
us to ensure that the universal obligations as prescribed by the European
Directive apply also to the VOIP service.
An additional problem for directory publishers in connection with VOIP
numbers also exists in the lack of geographical identification of the
number. As the European Commission writes in its Q&A paper on the future
of VOIP:
“Technology wise, if the caller is “nomadic”, it is difficult to know
where the VOIP caller actually is. It is similar to a user accessing a
website from anywhere in the world: there is no way that the website can
know where the user is from”.
This poses additional difficulty to publishers when including the
subscribers’ listing into geographically organised directories.
Particularly, as in some very liberal countries, a citizen of that country
can sometimes acquire a number with an area or even country code that
would appear to indicate that he is located in another region, or even
another country.
European directory publishers are therefore turning to the European
Commission for some guidelines to clarify the obligations on VOIP
providers to supply their listings, so that directory publishers can
further benefit from legal clarity created by the Directive in their
future publishing activities. Such guidelines issued by the European
Commission could also serve to ensure more consistency throughout Europe
while various regulators discuss the possible solutions applicable to the
VOIP in their respective countries.
We look forward to the Commission’s reply and remain at your disposal.
Should you wish to put any question to us, please contact our EU Affairs
Officer, Anna Cichocka.
Yours faithfully,
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