TELECOMS: COMMISSION PERSUADES AUSTRIA NOT TO IMPOSE TAX ON ANTENNAS.

Lower Austria, the biggest province in the country, announced on July 21 that it intended to impose a tax of up to euro 21,000 per antenna at the beginning of next year in line with a law recently voted by the new conservative/social democrat coalition. The province, which hosts 3,500 of Austria's 17,300, claimed that it wished to make the operators share the sites so as to avoid a multiplication of antennas with the spread of the UMTS broadband network. Users, operators and the central government have been protesting against this new tax. The Commission also feared that the practice might spread to other members of the EU and result in an increase in prices.

"The Commission has serious doubts about the legal and economic justification for this tax, which would inhibit competition and create extra costs for both the industry and consumers" repeated Viviane Reding on December 2. In exchange for the dropping of the proposal, the commissioner agreed to drop the infringement proceedings against Lower Austria. "This tax would have created a serious precedent. Now, it is the opposite: the solution which we have worked out together has created a positive precedent"...