EU Phone Home

So the EU’s little bit of feel good regulation has got through the committee stage of the EP, now we just have to wait to see how it will fail. All of the mobile networks, which tend to have a lot of debt at the moment, will seek to maintain their profits by raising the prices elsewhere or cutting back on investment. So there are either going to be less new products, or the current ones that get used now a lot more than international roaming will be marginally more expensive. But most people spend most of their time without having to use his service, which is why the cut throat competition in the domestic markets has driven the prices of everything else so low and not international roaming.

Certainly some people would rather have cheaper international roaming in exchange for more expensive other services, and they are already free to go out and look for anybody offering that service or start one up themselves. If they cannot find them or think starting up the service is unviable (due to the small numbers that are willing to pay for it) then there are a multitude of other options. You could just buy a local sim card, then there are the various pre-paid international call cards and specialist international carriers, the internet either through one of the many text based systems or voice systems such as skype, landlines, even old fashioned snail mail. The only people that this will have a major positive effect on is people that spend a lot of time moving across countries, for example travelling between Brussels and Strasbourg every month with frequent other trips to various countries. Like MEPs. A group of politicians using their power to distort the markets for their own personal interests while selling it as something that will benefit everybody when it will in fact only really benefit a very small number of people like themselves. Plus de change, plus la meme chose.