Michal Kobosko's formulation is blunt: the EU's Digital Networks Act, he argues, is turning into a flat rate on spectrum lead times — a promise about how fast frequencies get handed out, dressed up as spectrum policy.
The criticism lands because it names the thing the Act is actually good at. Europe's problem with spectrum has never been a shortage of frequencies. It has been time. National assignments for 5G have slipped years past the deadlines Brussels set; the 26 GHz band, once billed as the backbone of industrial 5G, remains largely unassigned; and each member state runs its own auction calendar, its own reserve prices and its own conditions, so a manufacturer building equipment for the single market gets a dozen different timelines.
Against that record, a harmonised timetable is genuinely valuable. The Commission's proposals lean on exactly this: common deadlines, a coordinated pipeline, and a peer-pressure mechanism for states that are slow. If the Digital Networks Act delivers only that, it will have delivered something.
The problem is what a lead-time guarantee leaves untouched. Spectrum is not a utility with a delivery date; it is an asset whose value depends on how it is assigned, to whom, and with what obligations attached. An auction extracts value for the public but can leave the band unsold or concentrated. Administrative assignment is faster but prices nothing, and quietly transfers an asset. A "flat rate" in Kobosko's sense is the policy that refuses to choose — it fixes the schedule and leaves the distributional question to twenty-seven national regulators with twenty-seven answers.
Two developments make the question harder to dodge than it was in 2024. Direct-to-device satellite services have turned terrestrial spectrum into something that can be substituted from orbit, which changes what a licence is worth and who wants one. And the investment case for dense 5G has weakened: the operators that overpaid in earlier auctions are the ones now arguing loudest that fees and obligations should be relaxed. A framework that treats assignment as a scheduling problem has nothing to say to either.
Kobosko's remark is a criticism from inside the process, not a rejection of it, and the European Parliament's role in the file is to amend rather than to block. But it points at the test the Act will ultimately face: whether, in five years, Europe has spectrum that was handed out on time, or spectrum that was handed out well. Those are different achievements, and only one of them produces a network.
