Notice for the launch of public consultation for the draft BEREC Report on the handling of third-party payment charges on mobile phone bills

During its 46th plenary meeting (11-12 March 2021) the Board of Regulators approved the draft BEREC Report on the handling of third-party payment charges on mobile phone bills.

In many European countries, mobile operators allow third-party providers to charge their customers via their mobile phone bills for goods or services. Such charges usually apply to:

• various services offered by phone call or via text message which are known as Premium Rate Services (PRS) as they are usually charged at higher rates than those normally applied to phone calls and text messages.
• the purchase of goods and services by Direct Carrier Billing (DCB) - a system of charging a mobile phone user for a good or service via their mobile phone bill.

To draft this Report BEREC collected useful information by means of an ad hoc questionnaire circulated to NRAs/competent authorities in September-October 2020. However, it should be noted that at the time of data collection, most NRAs and/or competent authorities were operating under the previous framework, as the transposition process of Directive 2018/1972 was still ongoing. The Report also aims to serve as a useful information tool in the search of the legal status of third party services, the responsibilities of NRAs/competent authorities and the scope of the present legal/regulatory obligations, as well as on current consumer protection measures and complaints in this regard.

Practical details of the public consultation

The public consultation is open from Tuesday, 16 March 2021, at 10:00 CET to Friday, 16 April 2021, at 17:00 CET.

Contributions received after the above-mentioned deadline will not be taken into account.

All stakeholders are invited to submit their inputs on the draft Report to the following email address: [email protected], or through the BEREC online public consultation platform on https://consultations.berec.europa.eu/en/consultation/43313.

When registering with the consultation platform, please indicate your name and/or the name of the organisation or company you represent.

After submitting the contribution via e-mail, you should receive reply with confirmation. If this confirmation e-mail is not received, the submission of the contribution was not successful and it should be submitted again.

Further enquiries about the consultation including registration with the online platform may also be submitted to this address: [email protected]

In accordance with the BEREC policy on public consultations, BEREC will publish a summary of all contributions received. All contributions will be published on the BEREC website, taking into account requests for confidentiality. Any requests for confidentiality should clearly indicate which information is considered confidential. It is also possible to send both a confidential and a public version.

Contributions should be sent preferably in English and include reference to relevant paragraphs or sections of the Guidelines, as well as to the question number, in order to facilitate processing the responses.