Economic Law, Regulation and Compliance

The regulatory authority of the North American telecommunications (Federal Communications Commission – FCC) adopted a position 5 August 2014 to admit that the service providers charge users for the service of priority access to content. For some commentators, allowing this monetization, the FCC has "killed" the "net neutrality". Immediately, President Barack Obama is strongly opposed to this position on behalf of the principle known as "net neutrality." The Washington Post, in its presentation of this reaction of the President, described it as "populist". Basically, it comes to choosing whether you prefer to favor companies that produce content and containing or to favor search engines. It is true that the search engines, whose business model relies heavily on the legal principle of "net neutrality" are American firms, like Google. On the other hand, many companies that carry the content and can therefore monetize the service of access to a priority basis are divided to more evenly around the world, including being located in Europe.

In its judgment of 23 July 2014, MM. B., A. et C., the Conseil d'État (French Council of State) shall transmit a  Question prioritaire de constitutionnalité – QPC (Priority Question of Constitutionality) to the Conseil constitutionnel  (French Constitutional Council) about the compliance of the procedural organization of the Cour de discipline budgétaire et financière – CDBF (French Court of fiscal and financial discipline) in terms of constitutional principle impartiality. Indeed, the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Council has incorporated in the constitutional corpus the principle of impartiality, objectively designed   as judicial jurisprudence and the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights have done and have imposed the organs exercising power sanction must give to see their impartiality (definition of the "objective impartiality") to third parties who must have confidence in this body which has power to impose sanctions.

Political power has often difficulties, or takes a long time to admit the principles of law, such as express the judges. So it was quite certain that the penalty proceedings held before the Autorité de Régulation des Communications Electroniques et de la Poste -ARCEP  (French Regulatory Authority for Electronic Communications and Post, as the investigation body and the judgment body were not sufficiently distinct crumpled the constitutional principle of impartiality. It was acquired about 15 years. Yet the organization has continued. It has been enough that an operator has been sanctioned. He used the procedure of Question Prioritairre de Constitutionnalité -Q.P.C.  Priority Question of Constitutionality) and Numéricable July 5, 2013 decision by the Constitutional Council came to declare that any sanction proceedings before ARCEP unconstitutional, because of objective procedural partialité, thus causing difficulty to the regulator. It took until the 0rdonnance of March 12, 2014 and finally the decree of 1st August 2014 to organize an efficient sanctions procedure, making this time an intern wall within the ARCEP between the services responsible for the instruction and those which are responsible for judging. The great judge Pierre Drai used to say: "Ne pas respecter le droit coûte cher (Do not respect the law is expensive)". We see here that this is true also for the Government which writes laws and regulations. So, for months, the regulator has been without power, to the delight of the operators, who often are tacticians or turbulent.

At first glance, only areas are regulated and the State doesn't enter private enterprises. But the imperative is reversed when a company absorbs the entire area, or when a firm has the project to absorb the area, such as Google has. The firm becomes "crucial" and the State must enter the company and intervene.  It is necessary to give the definition of a "crucial firm". A firm is "crucial", in a negative sense, when its failures could cause the collapse of the system; a firm is positively "crucial" if through it the industry is facing the purpose to serve the future of the social group. The State is then legitimate to enter the company to make its voice heard, sometimes to exercise its decision-making powers. The competitive dynamism and power of property don't exclude the superimposition of the common concern for the future, which some call the general interest.

The expression "regulated company" may appear as an oxymoron : the State  regulates areas (markets, networks, etc.) because of their structural failures, but the State doesn't enter a company that develops its activities autonomously. But on reflection, it is sometimes necessary to "regulate a company" and this necessity is increasingly imposed. This is imperative if a company absorbs the entire area, because it is a monopoly or because it wants to become the heart of a crucial area, such as Google which has the project to become the future global brain. In a more general way, it is a necessity to  locate businesses which are "crucial", banks are only one example, and organize, beyond supervision, providing direct regulation of such firms. This regulatory power on critical firms must take the form of attendance of public power and policy within the company itself, so that the state interfere in decisions which social group suffers the consequences. The control can go beyond this "public presence" to take the form of "public authority", the state ruling as operator. Under such conditions of "cruciality", the neutralization of "public enterprise" by the competition law must cease, the public company must be better recognized as a regulatory instrument in distance with the simple game of competition.

This working paper was prepared as a basis for a contribution to a forthcoming volume of the collection Le rapport moral de l'Argent dans le Monde ( The Moral Report of Money in the World). It develops the idea that everyone has the impression that the law is more powerful than ever in banking and financial regulation: Law invades everything and appears in its most terrible form that is criminal and repressive administrative law. It seems that the beginning of everything is Law ! But in reality, we must consider that the law is weaker than ever. Indeed, if the law of banking and financial regulation has become primarily repressive, it is because it is weak. It took the form of a multitude of microscopic rules and  punishment is only lending its force to any prescription. Repression has lost its autonomy, and has become a sort of simple enforcement of civil multiple rules. Moreover, the legislation degenereted into regulations. The Regulation goes into a random pile of incomprehensible and complexe requirements. On the contrary, the operators would need a law that fixed in advance and clearly a few strong lines of conduct. So it is a weak and shoddy law which the banking and financial regulators are building for the future. It will be severe only because it will be weak and  poorly done. The lawyer will be be as chagrined as the financier is.

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► Full Reference: M.-A. Frison-Roche, Le transfert de la compétence normative d'édiction des lois et règlements en matière de droit civil, de la métropole aux institutions propres à la Nouvelle-Calédonie. Étude pour le Congrès de Nouvelle-Calédonie (The transfer of the normative power to enact laws and decrees in the field of civil law from metropolitan France to institutions specific to New Caledonia. Study for the Congress of New Caledonia), 2012, 88 p. - La confection de ce rapport a été faite à partir des travaux sur les textes, des lectures et des réflexions, mais aussi de nombreuses rencontres avec les parties prenantes sur place. Le séjour et la remise du rapport ont donné lieu à de nombreuses interventions publiques. L'on peut notamment se référer à la conférence Le transfert du droit civil, une opportunité pour la Nouvelle-Calédonie, donnée au Congrès de Nouvelle-Calédonie. En outre, de nombreuses interviewes ont été données à la télévision, dans le presse écrite et à la radio.   Lire la table des matière du rapport. Lire le rapport dans son intégralité. Lire un interview dans la presse à propos de ce travail. Voir la conférence donnée en métropole à ce propos.   Lire le résumé du rapport ci-dessous.

► Full Reference: Frison-Roche, M.-A., "Proposition pour une notion : l’opérateur crucial" (Proposal for a notion: the "Crucial Operator"), D. 2006, pp. 1895-p. 1900. - ► Article English Summary: The market is conceived as having two kinds of actors: operators and regulators. But we can suggest a third term: the crucial operator. This notion, proposed here, assumes that the sector cannot function without it. It could be a network manager or a systemic company, the failure of which produces a domino effect, or a structure that maintains a system like the financial market companies. These kinds of "second-tier regulators" then have more rights and more obligations. They are either holders of essential infrastructure, or bearer of capital innovation, or centralize system risks. The regulatory systems should be rethought by integrating these "crucial operators". - 📝read the article. - ► More developed Article English Summary: Competition Law neutralizes economic agents who act on the markets, by the rule of capital neutrality. Thus, the company is a transparent legal concept, which erases the specificities of organizations. Public enterprises are therefore only considered as an enterprise and the notion of "national champion" is rejected. To escape this neutrality, without falling into the arbitrariness of the States against which Competition Law rightly fights, there is great interest and relevance in developing the concept of crucial operator. The idea of ​​a crucial operator is to no longer think of it in a neutral way, not in relation to its capital or those who govern it, but in relation to its market behavior. In fact, cruciality can be defined as the quality of an organization which puts in its dependence the efficiency and the good functioning of other organizations. In this, cruciality is the opposite of competition, which postulates that the company not only does not depend on others but also will seek by nature to harm it by appropriating demand to the detriment of its competitors. But it may happen that the market cannot be satisfied with the aggressive mobility that is competition and supposes the stability and support of others operated by the crucial operator. This is so when the operator is the manager of an essential infrastructure since the other operators depend on it. This is also the case when the operator is the bearer of market innovation, which justifies access rights under essential facilities or agreements to produce research. The third case is when the operator carries the risks of the system, which explains why banks and financial institutions are most often crucial operators in that they carry the systemic risks of the banking and financial system. It is thus measured that the public or private character does not interfere in the qualification of crucial operator any more than the monopolistic character or not of the operator considered. The consequences of such a qualification as a crucial operator is that the operator must have more obligations than an ordinary operator. Thus, the infrastructure manager has the obligation to open it to third parties, even though control usually generates a power of exclusion. Similarly, financial or insurance institutions, because they must prevent risks, will be obliged by specific prudential standards. But the crucial nature of the operator gives him rights but also powers. This is how market companies, operators of private law who hold the places, have a disciplinary power of exclusion that some have compared to the power of the State. What is more, the crucial operator then appears to be a "second tier" regulator. Indeed, according to a pyramid figure, ordinary operators are subject to the disciplinary power of crucial operators who themselves are governed by public regulators, who are the first rank regulators. This quality of second-level regulator obliges the operator to behave towards his competitors with the same virtue as that which characterizes the regulator and first of all impartiality. This is the case with non-discrimination in accessing the network from its own competitors. In addition, a regulator must be accountable and behave in a transparent manner, while the ordinary operator is not subject to this principle, since competition law does not require transparency of structures and behavior. This link between regulation and governance clearly applies to financial operators, but it is also observed with regard to network operators. We thus measure that if positive law, giving form by a last effort of vocabulary to established rules, recognized the existence of the notion of crucial operator, it would better identify this intermediate category between the ordinary operator and the regulator, because the crucial operator is a company, entering into the game of supply and demand but it also supports the stable structure of the market and the stability of this market, which is not the usual aim of companies. -

Full Reference : Frison-Roche, M.-A., "L’hypothèse de l’interrégulation", in Frison-Roche, M.-A. (ed.) Les risques de régulation, coll. « Droit et Économie de la Régulation », t.3, Dalloz / Presses de Sciences-Po, 2005, pp. 69-80. The topic of of this article is to propose a new notion, already presented in 2001 in the article "Regulation Law": "Interregulation". This mechanism will makes more easier a unified decision when several autonomous, even contradictory, regulations are legitimate to rule a situation. This creation therefore responds to a gap in the general system, of which the antimony is a variant. Political power no longer has the means to unify these disparate sources because it is "overtaken by the globalization of sectors and markets. Likewise, the hierarchical mode of traditional law cannot be suitable for autonomous sectorial regulations. There is therefore a need for interregulation between regulators, for the creation of a common "doctrine", or by procedural means, such as "authorized advice". Read the article. (written in French) Read the general presentation, written in English, of the collective book, Les risques de régulation, in which this article has been published.   Below, read the article Summary.   

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After defining what may be a "crisis of Regulation" and stressing that the crisis is a political phenomenon, the book devotes its first part of "systemic risk," which refers to the assumption of the general crisis. This hypothesis is exposed to prospectively or from cases in different sectors, e.g. financial, energy and health, before wondering how to organize post-crisis. The regulation itself including risk, the book chooses to study especially the inconsistency because it is the higher legal risk for an economic system. Therefore, it is proposed to organize inter-regulation mechanisms. Finally, the specific risks Regulator is able to address are conflicts, through the dispute settlement mechanism, derived from judicial system. It is examined in each of the regulated sectors.