You Win Some, You Lose Some: Dutch Telecom Incumbent KPN

All attacks by the cable companies and KPN's downstream customers against the 2008 conditional first phase approval of the creation by KPN of its glass fibre joint venture Reggefiber were unsuccessful. The Rotterdam District Court recently annulled the NMa's approval decision, but upheld its legal consequences: the setting up of the joint venture.¹ In a 2010 interlocutory ruling, the court found that the NMa based its decision that no second phase investigation into the joint venture was required on insufficient grounds.² However, after a further substantiation of the NMa's reasoning, the court was convinced that the bundling of the optical fibre network activities of KPN and Reggefiber in the joint venture was unproblematic. The appeals by downstream customers of KPN against the effectiveness of a number of the remedies in the NMa's 2008 decision were just as unsuccessful.³ Recently, the NMa also gave unconditional first phase approval to the acquisition of