Copper "Switch-Off"

Irish Authorities seem helpless to make it happen. They'd probably be quite pleased to hide behind an EU regulation. Anyway here's the overall rationale.

Practical need for EU action

The initiative will have significant added value compared to action taken at Member States level. Strengthening European competitiveness requires access to fast, secure, and resilient digital infrastructure. In a context where the digital connectivity landscape is changing rapidly with convergence of telecom, satellite, cloud and edge technology, driven by virtualisation and AI, the EU will only be able to achieve those objectives through a more harmonised legal environment across the EU that avoids inconsistent national administrative practices or implementation conditions that limit the opportunities of the single market.

Experience with the EECC shows that Member States have not been able to address the sectoral challenges timely, due to the long time needed for transposition of the Code into national law. In addition, the transposition of directives into national law has been often accompanied by additional layers of rules resulting in overregulation.

Overall, the scale of the problems in the digital ecosystem requires a legislative initiative at EU level because they have increasingly an EU dimension, and can be more efficiently resolved at Union level, leading to overall greater benefits, more accelerated and harmonised implementation, and lower costs than if Member States acted alone.