 business plans, they have suc- ceeded in driving down Canada's long-distance rates. Furthermore, com- petition in broadband is at least as robust as in the United States, and it has developed without the extensive unbundling regime that U.S. regulators erected and subsequently dismantled. On the whole, the CRTC's conserv- ative regulatory policy has been remarkably successful, and it has allowed Canada to avoid the excesses of an investment boom followed by a collapse Telecom Reform in Other Countries in stock market values-that is, it did not experience a "bubble" of the magnitude of the one that engulfed telecommunications in the United States. The European Union The European Union began liberalizing its telecommunications market on January 1, 1998. Europe had much more work to do than its counterparts in North America because most European telecom sectors had been dom- inated by a single, government-owned national operator until the late 1990s. The Regulatory Choices Under the EU liberalization, all countries were required to privatize their incumbent telephone companies, open these companies' networks to com- petition, and establish an "independent" regulatory authority. Although the broad dimensions of EU regulation are set by the European Commission in Brussels, the details of formulating regulations and enforcing them are left to the national regulatory authorities. In 1997-98 the European Union released a series of directives that would guide the liberalization of telecom- munications in member countries. In accordance with these directives, each country's independent regulatory authority must admit new entrants, pro- vide carrier pre-selection and number portability, set prices for intercon- nection between incumbents and entrants, limit "universal service" subsi- dies, and initiate a variety of other regulations governing incumbents and entrants. 16 Although most countries were to begin opening their sectors on January 1, 1998, there was no express policy for unbundling network facil- ities until Decem