Long live OPTA!

Although explicitly installed as a provisional body, the Dutch telecommunication controller OPTA displays some signs typical of government institutions that seek to become indispensable. A conflict in OPTA's two main policy objectives---guarding consumer prices through controlling the network operator and encouraging entry into the telecommunication market in order to establish symmetric competition---hinders OPTA in making itself redundant. In this paper it is shown that a market structure with a dominant owner of the network and a few fringe firms, among which OPTA referees for ever, is a stable Nash equilibrium. Apart from a warning for this undesirable state of affairs, some possible remedies are discussed. Long live OPTA, but leaner and meaner, supervising a symmetrically competing market.