It seems that Kroes only launched the inquiry into telco's as part of her commision on competition. The price regulations came after her time there (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission_roaming_reg...)
The job of the competition commission is to make sure there is real competition, but what they have done is plain old price fixing. In this case, their actions make low income people subsidise the mobile life-style of high income people.
I'm not sure what the free-market theory on that is (it is an interesting topic though) - making a smaller group of customers pay (and have limited alternatives but to pay) to be more competitive in other parts of your market.
The competition commission doesn't have a legal mandate to give preferencial treatment to minorities. They have a very clear mandate and they should stick to it in the interest of seperation of concerns.
The particular minority concerned in this case is a rather wealthy one that benefits from free markets in other respects more than the average person. They don't need extra help from governments.
Helping minorities by fixing individual prices tends to be inflexible because any change in the underlying economics or social culture has to be to be compensated with new regulation which often doesn't happen in a timely fashion.
Preferencial treatment for minorities should, in my view, focus on life and death issues, freedom of expression, legal matters, etc.
The prices charged for roaming where insanely and artificially high.
The EU commission provided multiple opportunities for the telcos to get their act together, which they didn't. Enforcing fair prices within the common market is exactly one of the missions of the EU commissioner in charge.
No wonder that the telcos hate it, but in this regard there was no competition. They all gouged their customers mercilessly until the EU put a stop on this.
[EDIT: clarification]
The competition commission should make sure that the markets aren't rigged and leave it to the market to determine the right price. I'm not saying markets always work well, but the telecoms market does.
market to determine the right price. I'm not saying markets always work well, but the telecoms market does.
Example? I'm charged 4 Euros (5$ +) for 1MB of data. Overseas I may be charged as much as 17EUR for a MB.
This is not a reasonable price determined by a free market, but price gouging and I can't switch to an alternative service provider.
At least - thanks to the wide availabilty of WiFi - I do have an alternative to such obscene prices.
For voice calls this is not the case. So I for one salute the EU's efforts to curb an out of control market.
Your mileage may vary, of course.
If governments effectively start to target profit margins for particular services it will result in massive misallocation of capital. The prices of basic services will go up and innovation will suffer, because one reason for innovating is to earn very high margins for a while until cheaper alternatives become available.