Draft Guidance on regulatory accounting approach to economic replicability test (ex-ante margin squeeze tests)

In 2013 the Commission adopted the Recommendation 2013/466/EU on consistent non-discrimination obligations and costing methodologies to promote competition and enhance the broadband investment environment. The Recommendation requires NRAs to put in place obligations to ensure economic replicability of SMP operators’ retail offers and therefore preventing them from engaging in margin squeeze practices. Currently NRAs are using various methodologies for conducting ex-ante margin squeeze tests.

While Annex II of the Recommendation contains specifies the parameters of the economic replicability test (ERT), the Guidance document sets out in which way the parameters can be determined in practice drawing on current practices of NRAs. The Guidance document intents to provide NRAs with information on how to conduct the economic replicability and more generally ex-ante margin squeeze tests in practice.

The Guidance document provides standard definitions and possible solutions with a particular RA perspective that would enable including and estimating influence of national circumstances into the test methods. The Guidance document aims to align the current practices with the provisions of the Recommendation.

The draft Guidance has been prepared to start an in-depth discussion between the BEREC members and with the stakeholders during the public consultation and the forthcoming 2^nd BEREC Stakeholder Forum Meeting (16 October 2014).

All stakeholders are invited to send their contributions by 24 October 2014 to: [email protected], preferably in English, in order to speed up the processing of the contributions.