International cooperation – a significant part of BEREC’s work

The ‘smart regulation’, ICT sector recovery and future cooperation - in the focus of the annual summit between BEREC and the Latin American Forum of Telecommunications Regulators (REGULATEL), held today, 2 June 2021.

In his opening remarks, the BEREC Chair Michel Van Bellinghen (BIPT, Belgium) emphasized the significance of international cooperation in the digital world. He noted that international collaboration had become one of BEREC’s work priorities as of last year. International cooperation allows exchange on cross-border and common issues and closely following global trends in technology and changing business models. It enables BEREC to retain its capacity to meet future challenges effectively. Moreover, BEREC has started to develop a Medium-Term Strategy for international cooperation. The strategy will seek to establish a systematic and structured approach to identify international relationships, which are beneficial to attaining BEREC’s priorities and fulfilment of its work programme, in line with BEREC’s resources. The BEREC Chair assured that in the future, Latin America would remain one of the priority regions of BEREC. 

In the discussion panels, the BEREC Vice chairs Dan Sjoblom (PTS, Sweden), Annemarie Sipkes (ACM, The Netherlands) and Jesmond Bugeja (MCA, Malta), together with the colleagues from REGULATEL, discussed “smart regulation, and ICT indicators and the future cooperation between the regulators in Europe and South America. Furthermore, Verana Weber, representing OECD, touched upon the important topic of economic recovery, during a keynote speech.

BEREC already has a long history of cooperation with regulatory networks in other regions, and the cooperation with REGULATEL is one of the longest. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed in 2013 and extended in 2015, 2017 and 2019. The regulators of the two continents have multiple mutual interests. The global pandemic has shown how essential, resilient global electronic communication networks are for the economies; therefore, more regulatory cooperation concerning different aspects of these networks is needed.