Virkkunen and Ribera confirmed as new EU telecoms policymakers

And that being the case, telecoms industry body the GSMA wasted no time in appealing to those new names to push on with the Digital Networks Act and, more specifically, the elements of the act that could bring scale and consolidation in the coming years.

Parliament voted in favour of the slate of commissioners set out by President Ursula von der Leyen for her second term in office, although at 370 votes for and 282 against, with a few dozen abstentions, the vote was closer than it might have been.

It felt like a rubber stamp though, the new commissioners-elect having been in the public eye for some months. We already knew that, pending the vote, Henna Virkkunen would step up as Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, while Teresa Ribera Rodríguez would become Executive Vice-President for the Clean, Just and Competitive Transition.

Those are big job titles – and big portfolios – but essentially we're looking at the new Thierry Breton and Margrethe Vestager as far as telecom policy goes.

"On behalf of Europe’s telecoms industry, the GSMA congratulates the incoming Commission, in particular Henna Virkkunen and Teresa Ribera, and looks forward to working with them in the years ahead," the GSMA said, as soon as the result of the vote was published.

That congratulatory statement was merely a stepping stone for the industry body to state its case on what needs to be done to help telcos in the coming years. It's nothing we haven't heard before – that €200 billion investment gap from the Draghi report came up, for example, as did concerns over Europe falling behind the rest of the world in the technology space. But it's a sign of what is to come from the industry when the new Commission takes office in December.

Top of the agenda for the GSMA is the forthcoming Digital Networks Act.

"Much of 2024 has been spent debating the merits of a new legislative proposal – a Digital Networks Act – and we welcome the indication that bringing this into force will be a high priority for the incoming Commission," the association said. "A competitive, secure and sustainable European telecoms single market that reduces regulation, updates spectrum licensing procedures, enables fair negotiations in the digital value chain, and facilitates consolidation will ease some of the pressure on this essential industry, which is the enabler of Europe's digital economy, and help close the significant investment gap it faces."

Much of that will come under Virkkunen's remit. She will be required to prepare a legislative proposal on the Digital Networks Act sometime early next year.

Breton and Vestager presented a white paper designed to shape the act earlier this year and triggered a storm of debate around the idea of a single European telecoms market. Subsequent comments from the then commissioners revealed the single market will be more about spectrum allocations at this stage, and even then, only to a degree. But the idea of a single European market appeals from a global competition perspective and is unlikely to suddenly disappear under the new Commission.

Like Breton, Virkkunen will doubtless find herself addressing the issue of in-market telecoms consolidation more than dealing with cross-border tie-ups, and this is where Ribera comes in.

Her official title is mainly around Europe's decarbonisaton push, but she will also serve as competition commissioner, which means it will be on her to deny operators' merger requests...or indeed approve them, should she choose to take a markedly different stance to her predecessor Vestager.

Stéphane Séjourné, EVP for Prosperity and Industrial Strategy, will tackle the internal markets brief, as Breton did, which will also make him a key player in the consolidation argument, once it inevitably arises.

For now, the GSMA has said its piece. But with the new Commission formally coming into being in a matter of days, we should get ready to start hearing the same old refrains across the telecoms sector: consolidation, spectrum allocation, 2030 Gigabit network targets, and the need for more investment. The names have changed, but not much else will.