To ensure a broader understanding of Parliament among a wide range of clients, including the media as well as professional and academic organizations, the House Administration is working on the second edition of House of Commons Procedure and Practice-a comprehensive study of House of Commons procedural rules and precedents.

All too many air traffic control organisations consult their customers – the airspace users – as a mere formality, or indeed focus only on their own national airline.

Standard terms elaborated individually by a company solely for its own use when contracting with its suppliers or customers are not horizontal agreements and are therefore not covered by these guidelines.

(7) In addition, the abolition of exclusive and special rights on the provision of voice telephony would have little or no effect, if new entrants would be obliged to use the public telecommunications network of the incumbent telecommunications organizations, with whom they compete in the voice telephony market. Reserving to one undertaking which markets telecommunications services the task of supplying the indispensable raw material, i.e. the transmission capacity, to all its competitors would be tantamount to conferring upon it the power to determine at will where and when services can be offered by its competitors, at what cost, and to moni ...[+++]tor their clients and the traffic generated by its competitors, placing that undertaking in a position where it would be induced to abuse its dominant position. Directive 90/388/EEC did not explicitly address the establishment and provision of telecommunications networks, as it granted a temporary exception under Article 90 (2) of the Treaty in respect of exclusive and special rights for the by far most important service in economic terms provided over telecommunications networks, i.e. voice telephony. However, the Directive provided for an overall review by the Commission of the situation in the whole telecommunications sector in 1992.

Under Directive 92/44/EEC, Member States must ensure that the telecommunications organizations make available certain types of leased lines to all providers of telecommunications services. However, the Directive provides only for such offer of a harmonized set of leased lines up to a certain bandwidth. Companies needing a higher bandwidth to provide services based on new high-speed technologies such as SDH (synchronous digital hierarchy) have complained that the telecommunications organizations concerned are unable to meet their demand whilst it could be met by the optic fibre networks of other potential providers of telecommunications i ...[+++]nfrastructure, in the absence of the current exclusive rights. Consequently, the maintenance of these rights delays the emergence of new advanced telecommunications services and therefore restricts technical progress at the expense of the users contrary to Article 90 (1) of the Treaty, in conjunction with point (b) of the second paragraph of Article 86 of the Treaty.