The views of Kroes and Almunia about competition are diverging more and more. While Kroes, the European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda (and for remonopolization, according to many) is clearly sacrificing competition in exchange for the (eventual) investments by incumbents in NGA networks, Almunia is really reluctant to follow this road.  His new guidelines on BB State Aids confirm that competition cannot be sacrificed and that only truly radical investments in next generation access networks (such as FTTH) can be financed by public funds. From Almunia’s point of view, this means that VDSL and other technologies on FTTC cannot be supported by Member States. By contrast, Kroes is putting all her hopes on such technologies, she believes that a simple upgrade of copper networks may be sufficient to show that she is successfully pursuing the targets of the Digital Agenda. See my article on the Huffington Post (in Italian).