This world of regulators and appeals is a waste of time

Net Results: How many layers of intervention are useful for making an industry get its behind in gear?

About a year ago the Government created the Electronic Communications Appeals Panel (Ecap) to try to fast-track appeals by the telecommunications industry against decisions by the Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg).

The panel will finally be issuing a decision on its first case next month: an appeal by new operator 3 (Hutchison 3G Ireland) against ComReg's determination that 3 was a "significant market power" and therefore could be regulated in special ways. For example, ComReg could cap the fees it is allowed to charge other operators to access its network.

I can't help but wonder whether such a panel is necessary, or if we aren't heading towards a ridiculous situation akin to looking into back-to-back mirrors, where all you see is a succession of the same thing over and over, receding into the distance?

I mean, I thought the regulator was there to regulate - to establish guidelines for industry activity and issue licences, yes, but also to consider industrial grievances and pass decisions upon them.

In other words, to regulate, just like it says in the name of this national body. But no. It turns out that we not only need to regulate the industry, we also need to regulate the decisions made by the regulator - in other words, we need to regulate the regulator who regulates the industry.

You can see it coming, can't you - a regulator to the regulator to the regulator of the industry, on into eternity. This is beginning to sound like an industrial version of The Old Lady who Swallowed a Fly.

Maybe I'm missing something here. Shouldn't we have a regulatory system where regulators are given the power in the first instance to pass judgments and enforce them? And furthermore, shouldn't we have a system that does not easily enable companies that are so regulated to endlessly take out court cases to delay the implementation of regulator decisions that they disagree with?

I think we can all at least agree that this is a nation that is so sue-happy that we make the US, once the model to the world for the frivolous court case and the outlandish settlement, look like a Judge Judy land full of amateurs.

We have seen the knock-on effect of this in other areas such as insurance, but why this trend has to accompany industrial regulation is beyond me.

I would have thought the Government had learned more from the Orange fiasco, in which operator Orange sued over the regulator's decision to award the third mobile licence to Meteor, delaying its implementation for aeons.

During this time the market was nicely sliced up between Eircell and Esat Digifone, creating a virtually competitionless market just raring to become - as it has - one of the most expensive mobile markets for consumers in the world, while also handsomely filling the coffers of the operators.

Well, the Government did decide it needed to do something - more tit-for-tat challenges to the regulator's decisions by operators Eircom and Esat (now BT) kept the overall telecoms market moribund for consumers and businesses. This was clearly not good for the economy, for competition, or our standard in international telecommunications and IT league tables.

Unfortunately the decision was not to brace up the regulator and provide the kind of power many observers believed has been badly needed for years, to give it any teeth for doing its job of regulation.

Nor was it decided that perhaps the whole legal system needs a serious seeing to, to figure out why everyone and her uncle feels court challenges need to be taken at the slightest bit of offence taken, and why juries like to dish out ridiculously large awards in spurious cases, and why each and every case seems to stretch out into the next millennium.

All you have to do is think of roads projects and the 10-year average to get a project finished due to challenges and appeals, and you'll see this is a legal system gone utterly mad. Instead, a regulator was appointed to the regulator, to expedite the appeals system needed because the regulator has so little power to demand companies keep to its decisions in the first place.

To add to this horror, parties to any judgment by Ecap have the right to - yes! - a High Court appeal if they aren't satisfied with what Ecap says about what ComReg has already said.

As Dorothy Parker once said, "What fresh hell is this?" Can we not just buckle down and fix what is broke instead of adding on more layers of bandages?

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