Mr. Rory Macmillan, Founding partner of Macmillan Keck, summarized his discussion paper titled ‘Challenges Facing Regulators’ and explained that convergent services are now a need for consumers and a big challenge to all stakeholders, including providers, governments and regulators, in terms of understanding the changes related to this issue.
The challenges faced by regulators can be grouped into three main clusters:

• Connectivity: Competition remains the most relevant factor for regulators in an increasing connectivity environment. Regulators should consider also optimizing the use of radio frequencies and exploiting the public assets to reduce the costs to get access to the ground. Other issues such as the persistent market failure gaps and the government intervention are also high priority challenges for regulators.
  
  
• Openness: Regulators are still facing challenges on how much “open” they should be. They still need to regulate very carefully the number of licenses and more specifically for example the number of wireline operators. In open markets, challenges regarding abuse of market power are increasing and problems of substitution should be dealt with. With the increasing openness of markets, regulators might need to redefine relevant market such as to have one market for fixed and mobile voice.
  
  
• Vulnerability: the main issue resulting from increasing connectivity and the openness is the vulnerability. It is more and more difficult for operators to deal with privacy, data protection and cyber security in an open environment and mainly in peer to peer connections such as the Internet world, where operators do not even have the legal rights on these contents. A very thorough coordination between governmental entities is needed to follow up on distribution of unlawful content and to ensure social goods, emergency services, directories and lawful intercept.
  

Mr. Macmillan concluded that in coping with these challenges it is becoming crucial for regulators to look at the overall ICT system to see where transformative intervention is needed. They need to keep an eye on durable regulations measures to give confidence to industry. Lastly, regulatory process should prevent dispute from happening in the first place. The solution is to allow concerned parties to give their views, to consider these views and to provide reasons to any decisions taken, in a nutshell the solution is for regulators to adopt transparency in their framework.

Following Mr. Macmillan’s presentation, as moderator of this session, Dr. Kamal Shehadi, Chairman and Executive Director of Lebanese TRA and chairman of GSR 09, raised some specific issues with the panelists. The discussion can be summarized as follows:

• Commitment to convergence and to the promotion of Network neutrality and openness of the infrastructure to make it available to all providers
  
  
• Open access could at first thought hinder investments; however with Technological advances and the need to share Content, it becomes a Must by any means.
  
  
• Main challenges facing converged environments are the new set of related manufacturing standards, the Intellectual Property rights and the security.
  
  
• Regulators should converge to deal with issues related to next generation networks. Strong coordination between entities dealing with content and entities dealing with infrastructure are necessary for the success of converged services.
  

In conclusion, technologies are going faster than regulatory regimes; therefore there is a need for rapid change. Convergent services are a win-win-win situation for all parties being the content providers, the infrastructure providers or the consumers. Competition is the main driver for new investments and a stimulus for innovation.