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Articoli Correlati: sim cards

In 2012, the Italian AGCM imposed penalties on the companies Wind Tre and Vodafone Italia for selling a particular kind of SIM cards. AGCM accused the two companies of not having sufficiently informed the consumers of the fact that some services had been pre-loaded and pre-activated and that the users could incur charges if they did not expressly ask for them to be deactivated. The TAR Lazio annulled the AGCM’s decisions stating that such sanctions fell within the competence of another authority, the AGCom. On appeal, the Consiglio di Stato stated that, under Italian law, the competence to sanction a mere infringement of information obligations in the electronics communication sector lay with the AGCom, while penalising a commercial practice that is considered aggressive fell within the AGCM’s competence, even in the e - communications sector. The Italian Court questions, however, whether the interpretation given is compatible with EU law. The EU Court (C-54/17 – C-55/17) notes that for a service to be solicited the consumer must have made a free choice. When the consumer has been neither informed of the fact that the services were pre-loaded and pre-activated on the SIM card that he bought, it cannot be considered that he freely chose the provision of them. The Court concludes from this that conduct such as that of which the telecommunications operators are accused constitutes ‘inertia selling’ and, therefore, according to the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, an aggressive practice that is in all circumstances unfair.