The Future of European Telecommunications

Bruno Liebhaberg is Executive Chairman of the think tank Centre on Regulation in Europe (CERRE) which he founded in 2010.

From 2018 to 2021, he was also the first Chairman of the European Union Observatory on the Online Platform Economy. He is also an Honorary Professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles’ Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management (SBS-EM ULB) where he taught from 1979 to 2018. Earlier in his career, he advised former European Commission President Jacques Delors on industry and R&D matters related to the completion of the EU Single Market.

He holds a Master’s in management sciences from SBS-EM ULB and a Ph.D. in Industrial Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

¹Also representing B.LIEBHABERG S.A., Director General

²Member of the Strategic Committee

Enrico Letta served as Prime Minister of Italy in 2013-2014 and as leader of the Italian Democratic Party in 2021-2023. He entered politics in 1998, after working as an academic. He was Minister of European Affairs in 1998, Minister of Industry in 1999-2001, and Member of the European Parliament from 2004-2009. In 2014, he became dean of the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po Paris. Today, he is the President of the Institut Jacques Delors and member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. In September 2023 he received a mandate from the European institutions to elaborate a High-Level Report on the future of the Single Market.

Federico Boccardi is Head of Connectivity Policy for Europe at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Before AWS, he held senior regulatory and technical positions in Ofcom (the UK communications regulator), Vodafone and Bell Labs (now part of Nokia) in the US, UK, Germany and Italy.

He has an extensive experience of technology, strategic, policy and regulatory projects across Europe, North America and LATAM. He has more than 100 between highly-cited publications, standard contributions and patents that are critical for the operations of 4G and 5G systems. He is an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol Smart Internet Lab and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. He is as a Member of the Advisory Board at the UK Telecoms Innovation Network, an initiative funded by the UK Government to strengthening the UK capabilities in telecoms. He received a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. degree in Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, and a Diploma in Strategy and Innovation from the Oxford Saïd Business School.

Since 2019, he has served as Vice President of European Affairs at TIM Telecom Italia. Before that, he was Director of External Relations at Tiscali. His experience in the telecom sector began in 2008 with Aria, a start-up focused on WiMax technology. In 2012, he co-founded Eunews, an online newspaper based in Brussels. Earlier in his career, he spent eight years at Poste Italiane, where he held various roles ending with Vice President of Brand & Advertising. He started his professional journey as a consultant after earning an MSc in European Studies from the London School of Economics (LSE) and a degree in Political Science in Rome. In his youth, he was an athlete on the national fencing team.

Jakob Greiner joined Deutsche Telekom in 2015. He is leading the group’s overall engagement towards the European institutions, international organizations & trade associations. Prior to that, Jakob worked as legal counsel for Apple in Germany and as political advisor to a Member of the European Parliament. Jakob is a qualified German lawyer, he holds a law degree from Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich and a PhD in European institutional law from the University of Bayreuth.

Dr Kamila Kloc joined the European Commission in December 2004. As of July 2023, Kamila was nominated as the Director of Directorate B Digital Decade and Connectivity of Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT) after acting in this position from February 2023. She held a position of the Head of Markets’ Unit in the same Directorate from 2019.

Previously she served as Deputy Head of Cabinet for Vice President Ansip responsible for Digital Single Market. Prior to joining the Cabinet, she worked at Directorate General for Energy coordinating exemptions from regulatory access rules for gas pipelines. During the Polish Presidency in 2011, she was seconded by the Commission to the President’s office of the Polish Energy Regulatory Authority.

Earlier, she worked for 5 years at the Directorate General for Competition dealing with merger and antitrust cases.

Prior to joining the Commission, she was employed at the Office for Competition and Consumer Protection in Poland as Adviser to the President. Kamila Kloc started her professional career in academia and taught at the Warsaw School of Economics as Assistant Professor. She has written her PhD on the role of competition policy in the public utilities sector with a special emphasis on telecommunications. She was a Fulbright scholar at the University of California in Berkeley and a Chevening fellow at Oxford University.

Lorelien Hoet is Director of EU Government Affairs at Microsoft. In this role, she has been dealing notably with data protection, European telecommunications regulation, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.

Before joining Microsoft in 2018, she worked as a legal executive at Proximus, and held different positions including Head of Legal Consumer business, and Director of Regulatory Affairs at Mobistar (Orange) in charge of the follow-up and application of telecommunications regulation and competition law files.

She holds an LL.M from KU Leuven.

Michel Van Bellinghen chairs the BIPT Council and is responsible for the following departments: Budget and Finance, Communications, Translation, International Relations and Registry.

Michel Van Bellinghen, Master of Laws (UCL), started off at the university in 1990 as a researcher, then became an assistant under the supervision of Professor Françoise Tulkens, at the UCL Laws Centre for Criminal Law.

He became an assistant advisor at the Ministry of Justice in 1992 under the supervision of Professor Marc Bossuyt and joined BIPT in 1997. From 1999 to 2003 he held the position of expert at the private office of Rik Daems, who was the Federal Telecommunications Minister at the time, and afterwards took up the function of Assistant Head of the Private Office. From 2003 until 2009 he was nominated Member of the BIPT Council for the first time. Following this mandate he remained closely affiliated to the Council and supervised the legal department of the regulator during a number of years. He has written scientific publications. In 2013 he held a position on the Council as a Member. In January 2017 he was assigned Chairman of the BIPT Council. In January 2024, he was reappointed as Chairman of the BIPT Council.

Alexandre de Streel is the Academic Director of the digital research programme at the Brussels think-tank Centre on Regulation in Europe (CERRE), professor of European law at the University of Namur and visiting professor at the College of Europe (Bruges) and SciencesPo Paris. He sits in the scientific committees of the Knight-Georgetown Institute (US), the European University Institute-Centre for a Digital Society (Italy) and the Mannheim Centre for Competition and Innovation (Germany).

His main research areas are regulation and competition policy in the digital economy (telecommunications, platforms and data) as well as the legal issues raised by the developments of artificial intelligence. He regularly advises the European Union and international organisations on digital regulation.

Previously, Alexandre held visiting positions at New York University Law School, the European University Institute in Florence, Panthéon-Assas (Singapore campus), Barcelona Graduate School of Economics and the University of Louvain. He also worked for the Belgian Deputy Prime Minister, the Belgian Permanent Representation to the European Union, and the European Commission. He has also been the chair of the expert group on the online platform economy, advising the European Commission.

Richard Feasey is a CERRE Senior Adviser, an Inquiry Chair at the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority and Member of the National Infrastructure Commission for Wales.

He lectures at University College and Kings College London and the Judge Business School.

He has previously been an adviser to the UK Payments Systems Regulator, the House of Lords EU Sub-Committee and to various international legal and economic advisory firms.

He was Director of Public Policy for Vodafone plc between 2001 and 2013.