Europe’s 13-year battle to end mobile roaming fees — which finally comes to a close Thursday — had it all: from septuagenarians in leather and stilettos to 3 a.m. screaming matches.
For lower-ranked EU officials, as I was at the beginning of the project, ending roaming was a romantic crusade. It was EU policy you could believe in, benefit from, and sell to the masses.
Working from 2011 as the Commission’s digital spokesperson, I helped commission opinion polls for the EU that showed 94 percent of Europeans supported an end to roaming charges.
The questions were leading — sunny days and dictators commanded less support — but we didn’t let that bother us. We called it policy-based evidence-making.
The core of the battle was a multi-billion-euro rip-off and a contest of ideas that goes to the heart of what the EU is all about.
The problem, according to us, was simple. Mobile phone providers had their customers in a vise when they traveled abroad. There’s not much market competition when you’re a thousand miles from home but dependent on your phone.
Roaming charges were also digital proof that the EU was failing to keep up with the 21st century. How borderless could the EU be if something as basic as your phone became less useful and more expensive when you crossed a national frontier?
A drama in four acts
If the roaming wars had been staged as a play, it would have unfolded in four acts. Its stars would have been European Commissioners Viviane Reding and Neelie Kroes. At the European Parliament, Spanish MEP Pilar del Castillo and British MEP Vicky Ford would have played supporting roles.
And there were side parts for Martin Selmayr — now Jean-Claude Juncker’s chief of staff — and yours truly, who each served for a time as the Commission’s digital spokesperson.
The play’s gang of greedy villains: familiar names like Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile.
After an aborted 2004 attempt by the Commission to rein in roaming charges through competition law, Reding and Selmayr got the ball rolling in 2007 by instituting price caps for calls and text messages. That was Act I — a job well done, but only half done.
By the time Kroes replaced Reding in 2010, data had become the new oil. And yet it still cost €6 for every megabyte of data downloaded while traveling in another EU country. There was nothing to stop a telecom company from charging a user €10,000 or more for accidentally downloading a video on holiday or forgetting to turn their email updates off.
Act II was preventing “bill shock” by automatically limiting roaming charges to €50 a month unless the customer actively requested more, and including data in the price caps.
Act III, to which I had an inside view, was pure drama.
By 2012, the EU was addicted to delivering annual reductions in the cost of roaming. The good headlines were irresistible to policymakers otherwise drowning in news about the financial and economic crisis. It was policy crack.
But the underlying problem — companies walled-off in national markets and customers overcharged as a result — remained in place.
‘Pack of thieves’
The Commission, hoping to give the market another chance to sort itself, punted, creating something called “Local Break Out.” If the name was meaningless, its real-world impact wasn’t much better.
The idea was to allow consumers to choose a different company to roam with, if their mobile operator was overcharging. In practice, of course, nobody wanted to go find and sign a separate contract for a weekend away in Rome.
Had we stood in the main square of Brussels and asked 100 people if they would use this new system, we would have realized quickly that it would fail. We didn’t and the problem remained unsolved.
Worse was to come. Under Kroes, relations between the EU and the industry hit rock bottom.
Things got so bad that by late 2012 the chief telecoms lobbyist in Brussels, Luigi Gambardella, had become persona non grata in Kroes’ office. The pair had to be physically separated by a security guard at an internet conference in Azerbaijan. Kroes was 71 at the time.
In 2013, efforts to end roaming charges had hit a wall. Most companies moved only as far as EU law forced them, on the day it forced them.
That year the Dutch commissioner turned up at a Vodafone board meeting to call the executives “a pack of thieves.”
“T-Mobile offers no-extra cost global roaming to American customers,” she later tweeted. “Why the hell not in Europe?”
When Kroes asked me on a flight to Cairo what her legacy would be, I told her that without a signature achievement, she wouldn’t have one. With the clock ticking on her term in office, ending roaming was the riskiest and the only viable political option. It was also what she had promised MEPs at her confirmation hearing in 2010.
Infighting at the Commission
Kroes went behind her policy advisers’ backs and told me to rewrite a speech to Parliament to include a plan to end roaming charges. We road-tested it with Marietje Schaake, a Dutch liberal MEP, in the beer garden of our Cairo hotel, and two days later Kroes launched a bid to rush out legislation to end the fees in time for the 2014 European election.
After telling MEPs she was throwing out her original speech, Kroes offered them an electoral gift they couldn’t refuse: “Will you join me in building something special between now and the European elections? I want us to show citizens that the EU is relevant to their lives.”
It was a bold plan — and it was nearly derailed by the founding architects of the effort to end roaming charges.
Martin Selmayr — by then promoted to chief of staff to Viviane Reding — tried to block the plan inside the Commission and disparaged it to journalists. A Commission “Impact Assessment Board” rejected the plans twice for lack of detailed proof that the law was needed. Reding urged commissioners to never let the draft law see the light of day.
Selmayr was pushing for Reding to be the next Commission president (this was before he switched horses to Jean-Claude Juncker), and the two of them wanted the glory of ending roaming fees for themselves, as part of a wider overhaul of telecommunications legislation that Kroes was bypassing in her rush.
Telecoms companies were predictably furious. The executives saw an attention-hungry politician — Kroes — out to take their cash and poison their customer relationships. They envisioned the entire continent running to cheap countries like Lithuania to buy their phone plans, then roaming all year long for next to nothing, leaving them with expensive networks to maintain and few customers.
An unfitting foe
It took until this year for the EU’s institutions to reach a compromise on the details that would kill the roaming beast, finally raising the curtain on Act IV.
Even with the finishing line in sight in 2016, disaster was only a step away. The companies continued to fight a guerrilla war over the details. And the Commission almost derailed the effort with an unpopular suggestion to limit cost-free roaming to just 90 days per year, and 30 days at a time.
Today the drama is over. If you buy 1GB of data at home, you get to use it anywhere in the EU for no extra charge. The same for calls and text messages.
Ultimately, however, despite all the time and effort, none of the major players emerged victorious.
Fighting to preserve roaming charges put companies on the wrong side of history; their fight against the Commission distracted them from their real enemies: the disruptive American tech companies. Even as Europeans fought over the mobile cake they baked in the 1990s, American internet upstarts were baking a new cake seemingly every minute.
As for the EU, it was too busy fighting the telecom companies to see the dragon of globalization rearing up behind it.
Even as we were establishing multilingual phone banks at the Commission — calling radio and television stations and newspapers across Europe — to sell the idea of free roaming, tens of millions of Europeans were getting angry about much bigger issues. Cheaper phone calls are great, but they don’t replace your job at the bankrupt factory.
The roaming battle was a product of its time, a luxury launched in a period of hopeful expansion. In an era of crises, populism and perilous geopolitics, the EU needs to better pick its fights. It can no longer afford to start 10-year battles over such tempting but minor issues.
Ryan Heath, a former European Commission digital spokesperson, writes the Brussels Playbook.