The Commission was concerned that the company may have infringed EU antitrust rules by contractually tying the licensing of its leading Aluminium Pechiney ("AP") smelting technology to the purchase of handling equipment (namely, pot tending assemblies or "PTAs") from its subsidiary Electrification Charpente Levage ("ECL").

However, the new approach taken by the Commission for greater harmonisation at EU level with regard to how to allocate the radio spectrum on the basis of common administration criteria, such as the principle of neutrality of services and the extension of the principle of a general licence, seems to ignore the public nature of the radio spectrum and to favour the commercial aspect.

As the honourable members of this committee know, the CRTC licence regulations and conditions for individual licensees require Canadian radio and television stations—and I'm just going to summarize—to perform public service functions consistent with the Broadcasting Act, to satisfy broadcasting public policy obligations, and to be accountable to regulatory review, all in the ordinary course of business.

3. The licence shall cover all of the stages necessary for the importation, manufacture and sale of the various ingredients of the product in question, including active ingredients, in order to enable the product to be sold for export to the WTO member or members or other country or countries in need cited in the application.

7. Notes the wide variation in the wireless communication market and licensing regime across the EU, and the importance to the EU's global competitiveness of the successful future development of this sector; suggests that a unified approach to licensing would be valuable, with the objective of improving market operation and spectrum availability; regrets that the Commission did not include in the report any figures on fees for the use of radio frequencies; points out that the fees for licences and authorisations should cover only j ...[+++]ustified and relevant administrative costs, that the use of radio spectrum should be subject only to such charges and fees that are necessary to cover the costs of the radio spectrum management and that consideration should be given to reinvesting licence revenues in spectrum management; except in special circumstances, radio frequencies should not be auctioned, since it has a negative effect on user fees and the spread and development of communications services;

The use of declaration procedures and class licences/general authorisations will be the rule, and more onerous individual licences will be the exception (reserved primarily for situations involving the grant of radio frequencies / rights of way, the imposition of universal service obligations and the imposition of particular competitive safeguards given the particular operator's strong market position). Licensing procedures would have to be open, transparent and non- discriminatory. Licence refusals would have to be justified (and subject to appeal) and a priori limitations on numbers could only be based on physical limitations, i.e. lac ...[+++]k of frequency and not on an economic assessment of the market's capacity by the national regulator.