Can Structural Separation be Imposed Under the UK’s Competition and Telecoms Regulatory Framework?

Beatrice Roxburgh, Tutor, The University of Law

Competition and regulatory authorities’ tool-kit generally includes the power to break up firms. However the evidence that customers benefit from separation is not always clear. In the telecoms industry for example, carving out Australia’s broadband assets into a separate company failed to address issues of broadband reach and availability in the way that had been hoped. The power to separate companies into different entities tends to be used sparingly. In the EU telecoms sector, there has to date been no compulsory separation of network infrastructure from the services that run off it.

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Competition Telecommunications December 2019 Vol.12, No. 49, Autumn 2019

Beatrice Roxburgh

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Beatrice Roxburgh is an experienced competition law practitioner, with a career spanning from private practice in two of the City's pre-eminent competition law firms, to competition law enforcement, followed by 15 years as senior in-house competition counsel with BT Group plc, and joining the University of Law in March 2018 to teach competition law. In that time, she has led a variety of cases and investigations in-house at BT, overseen dawn raids as a competition law enforcer, and in private practice advised major corporates, government and public bodies on all aspects of European and UK anti-trust law (including its application to international mergers, joint ventures and other transactions). At the University of Law she aims to give our future practitioner the benefit of her experience and kindle the enthusiasm of the next generation of competition lawyers.

Competition Telecommunications December 2019 Vol.12, No. 49, Autumn 2019