The Competition and Market Authority intervenes on the amendments to the decree Cura Italia on the stop portability. Here’s what he said
Blocking the portability of the number citing as a reason the protection of public health, endangered by the coronavirus pandemic, is a measure “certainly disproportionate, even in an emergency phase such as the one we are going through”. This is what the Antitrust Authority says in an opinion on some amendments to Decree Law 17 March 2020, n. 18.
The reference is to two specific amendments to the decree “Cura Italia”: the one of the League, first signature Matteo Salvini, and the one of M5S, first signature Mauro Contorti. Both amendments, practically a copy and paste of the other, called for the suspension until the end of the pandemic of the possibility for users to change mobile phone operator and even to activate new SIM cards. This would lead, in practice, to the suspension of the telephony market in its current state without any possibility of changing operator or number. All this, the amendments state, in consideration of the “state of emergency on the national territory related to the health risk connected to the onset of pathologies deriving from transmissible viral agents”.
Stop portability: the opinion of the Guarantor
According to the Authority there is no real reason to block the portability of numbers, given that “most of the migration activities are carried out remotely without physical interaction”. Smartworking, therefore, should also apply to telephone operators and not only to user-workers. But that’s not all, the opinion of the Antitrust Authority goes even further because it defines the stop to portability not only unnecessary, but even harmful. And this is because it translates into “the impossibility for customers to change provider of fixed and mobile phone services, at a time when it seems particularly important to find the commercial offer more suited to new needs. Just when we have to stay at home, in fact, we need more advantageous tariffs for phone calls and Internet connections.
Network infrastructure: what the AGCM says
There is then another side of the coin, that relative to the network infrastructure. From various quarters, especially from the telecommunications unions, the hypothesis of the stop to portability was justified by the need of the larger network operators to maintain their customers in order to have the necessary resources to make new investments in infrastructure. A reasoning, according to the AGCM, wrong: “there are several interventions that can lead to a faster construction of the fiber optic network, such as that of reducing the administrative burdens provided for the realization of the networks, encourage the sharing of infrastructure and increase the degree of information with respect to existing infrastructure through the instrument, still not fully operational, the National Federated Information System of Infrastructure (SINFI)”.