The EU Commission has now wasted almost a year after making its SEP Regulation proposal

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ipfray_the-european-commission-has-wasted-a-year-activity-7188535776765173761-ID1r?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

The European Commission has wasted a year now (almost to the day) on that legislative initiative called EU SEP Regulation. They made the formal proposal based on (at best) scant and anecdotal evidence, ignoring their own researchers' finding that there was no evidence for a standards system in jeopardy.

They could have made much better use of that time by realistically assessing the evidence and drawing the appropriate conclusions from it. The SME concerns that were stated in response to the consultation were partly not credible: anyone who understands the real world could tell that some of it must have been written by lobbyists trying to overstate or simply make up problems. But it would have been reasonable to say that the SME SEP licensing question deserved a closer look.

The Commission could have asked SEP holders and implementers for more specific input on what's really going on. How many royalty demand letters have SMEs actually received? What rates are paid by SMEs versus large-scale licensors like Apple and Samsung?

The Commission should also have taken a close look at actual incidents of companies being forced out of key parts of the EU's Single Market, such as OPPO, OnePlus and vivo in Germany.

Nothing would have been wrong with trying to understand. Maybe the findings would ultimately not have supported any legislative initiative (at least not an immediate one, but only as a last resort). There wasn't a basis to rush to judgment and propose something that does not take aim at any actual issues, but creates a host of new problems.

DG GROW doesn't have the kinds of investigatory powers that DG COMP has, but they were working together on this to some extent (at least according to what DG COMP's former Chief Economist Pierre Régibeau said at a webinar). Maybe the best thing to do would have been for DG COMP to take a closer look and send out information requests, and to some extent the findings could have informed a legislative initiative.

Instead, they just tried to start a process in hopes of maybe getting some kind of regulation (as if the EU didn't already have plenty of them) adopted before the end of the current Commission term.