>"Europe's telecoms operators are facing decreasing revenues ... compared with operators in the U.S. and Asia,"
Because decisions on regulation should always have the goal of preserving the existing business models of middlemen:)
It's an important truth with a lot of implications for the wealth of nations that wages are sticky on the way down; should we devote as much study to the fact that modern governments don't believe that any regulation should be allowed to make the overall system more efficient?
The responsibility of the financial services are to allocate the utilization of resources between ventures that would produce more resources, and of course they as an industry find that 40% of that would be best allocated to themselves.
The responsibility of government is to facilitate interactions between people by providing rules, and guaranteeing that other actors that can facilitate that interaction be distributed efficiently within the system, and have to operate at a minimum quality standard. It has also taken on the duty of handing money to any rent-seeker whose actual facilitation function has become obsolete in the face of technology and other productivity gains.
This adds up to a situation where the financial industry and the state conspire to make sure that no productivity gains reach any individual either not in the financial services, or who doesn't represent a scarce resource required by rent seekers, i.e. mechanics of ways to obstruct interaction between individuals.
My only hope is that the inevitable slowdown in productivity that will come as the benefits of the Internet peter out (and by the repetition of identical siloed communication tools as a business model, that time is nigh) will force societies to eliminate these generalized inefficiencies just to keep up with population growth. We're seeing how that's going to play out right now in health care, education, and housing.
Sorry for typing this excerpt of my endless rant:)