Review of the List of the Relevant Markets Public Consultation

The Communications Regulatory Authority (CRA) recently announced the needs to shift its focus from the Retail Relevant Markets to Wholesale Relevant Markets. To achieve the above focus, the CRA launched today a public consultation to seek the industry’s comments and feedback on the list and definition of the relevant markets in Qatar.

According to the CRA, based on the new regulatory focus:

• Ex-ante regulation at the wholesale level should be considered sufficient to tackle potential competition problems on the related downstream market(s). The list of relevant markets should be defined accordingly;
•  Regulation shall shift its focus from the retail side to the wholesale side as a needed move towards lighter forms of regulations, less intrusive, giving ground for innovation;
• A wholesale focus implies shifting the level of regulation to a higher point in the value chain focusing on the real bottlenecks, on the inputs not being replicable from a technological or economic point of view;
• Such a change in focus does not mean that retail regulation will disappear overnight -  the shift will be gradual and a wholesale regulation will be the main means to achieve CRA objectives to the benefit of customers, providers and of the whole national economic system.

The CRA believes that the first step to achieve these objectives is the review of the list of relevant markets focusing on wholesale market rather than on retail markets therefore leading to a decrease in the number of regulated markets.

The review of the list of the Relevant Markets shall be accompanied to a more clear definition of the products included in them, to facilitate the regulatory actions.

The scope of this is consultation is to acquire the view of the industry on the Relevant Markets and on the Relevant Markets susceptible of ex-ante regulation. In the meantime, the CRA is seeking suggestions on the ex-post regulation that should be applied to monitor the markets.

This consultation is a first round of discussion and will be followed by a second consultation, based on the responses provided by the SPs and on the CRA view.

The consultation can be found at the following this link