- The Guardian, Monday July 14 2008
Europe's mobile phone companies are braced for a clash with EU regulators this week as telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding calls for the cost of sending texts when abroad to be more than halved. The EU is also set to announce a clampdown on mobile ringtone services that offer "free" downloads to snare teenagers into signing expensive monthly contracts.
The EU's consumer protection chief Meglena Kuneva has looked at more than 500 such services across the EU as part of an investigation into possible breaches of consumer protection legislation. She is understood to want national regulators to take legal action against ringtone providers that do not make it plain to consumers they are signing up for a paid subscription service. She wants anyone selling subscription services - which cost consumers several pounds a day - to be barred from using the term "free" on promotional texts and adverts.
The Office of Fair Trading and the UK's premium-rate content regulator, PhonepayPlus, have been involved in the inquiry and on Thursday - the same day as Kuneva's announcement - PhonepayPlus will unveil its proposals for a wide-ranging shakeup of an industry that across Europe is worth more than €500m (£400m) a year. PhonepayPlus said recently that it has seen complaints about such services double over the first three months of this year.
The hidden charges behind ringtones hit the headlines in the UK three years ago when parents complained that their children had unknowingly signed up for subscription services when they downloaded the popular Crazy Frog ringtone.
PhonepayPlus's new proposals, however, include not just ringtones but cover the advertising and promotion of other forms of mobile content such as games and are designed to make it very clear to consumers what they are paying and what they will get when they sign up.
Reding, meanwhile, has become increasingly annoyed with the mobile phone industry's failure to reduce the cost of using a mobile phone overseas. She has already clamped down on the cost of making calls abroad and will tomorrow set her sights on text roaming prices.
The commission reckons that the average consumer is charged about €0.30 (24p) to send a text from abroad and Reding wants that slashed to €0.12. She will also call for reductions in the cost of using the internet abroad through a mobile phone, known as "data roaming", which has become a particularly contentious subject recently because of the introduction of the iPhone.
The average cost of downloading 1MB of data in the EU is €5.24 (£4). The commission is understood to be considering calling for the price that the mobile phone companies charge each other - known as the wholesale price - for that amount of data to be slashed to €0.35.
