Strategy without vision (23 January 2000) We've issued an informal response to OFTEL's strategy statement Achieving the best deal for telecoms consumers. There are two principal problems with OFTEL's statement. Firstly, OFTEL clearly wants to regulate less, but remarks to that effect are highly premature; the statement implies a world of telecommunications which does not exist and need never exist. OFTEL assumes that several initiatives which have the potential for increasing competition and driving down prices work, thus allowing it to move regulation away from itself and towards the telecommunications industry and consumer bodies. Yet competition is not automatic even when a plausible framework for it has been set up, as the poor record of the UK cable industry and the largely static nature of national tariffs over the past few years demonstrate. With wonderful timing, a BBC News Online article entitled Deutsche Telekom profits plunge 45 per cent appeared on the day the first draft of our response went up for review. Such is the effect of real competition: will such a headline ever appear in this country? Secondly, it is a statement without vision, being little more than a bureaucratic outline of procedures and techniques to - OFTEL hopes - foster, monitor and measure competition. There is no attempt to address structural issues, no indication of what the telecommunications industry is expected to do in return for OFTEL regulating less and, really, no vital spark. We warned before about OFTEL being too satisfied with the last implemented technology and uninterested in what could come next, and we issue that warning again. We constrast OFTEL's strategy statement with that of the American regulator, which has produced A New FCC for the Twenty-First Century. It is a real strategy statement, full of explicit goals and how success or failure in achieving them will be measured.