Pakistan’s Telecom Has No Competition Rules, Two Regulators Have Been Fighting Over It for a Decade

Pakistan’s Telecom Competition Rules have been stuck in a jurisdictional dispute between the IT Ministry and the Competition Commission of Pakistan for ten years, and the rules remain unfinished even as the country’s telecom market undergoes its most significant consolidation in history and prepares to deploy 5G infrastructure on spectrum auctioned earlier this year.

A regulatory framework conceived in 2015 and drafted in 2016 should not still be unfinished in 2026. The Telecom Competition Rules, intended to provide a dedicated competition framework for one of Pakistan’s most economically significant sectors, have spent a decade cycling through consultations, revisions, legal vettings, and inter-institutional meetings. None of it has produced a final set of rules. And the reason, official documents now confirm, is that two institutions cannot agree on which of them has the legal authority to frame them.

What the Rules Were Supposed to Do

The Telecom Policy 2015 envisaged a dedicated set of competition rules specifically tailored to Pakistan’s telecommunications sector. Clause 5.1.2 of that policy assigned the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication responsibility for drafting the rules. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority submitted an initial draft to the ministry in 2016.

The purpose was to fill a gap that generic competition law, applicable across all sectors of the economy, cannot fully address. Telecommunications has specific market dynamics: high fixed infrastructure costs, significant barriers to entry, natural monopoly characteristics in certain network segments, and complex interdependencies between wholesale and retail markets that require regulatory tools adapted to those realities. The Telecom Competition Rules were supposed to provide those tools, establishing sector-specific frameworks for preventing abuse of dominance, anti-competitive bundling, discriminatory access to infrastructure, and collusive conduct in a market where a handful of operators control all meaningful infrastructure.

A decade later, that framework does not exist.

The Jurisdictional Dispute

The obstacle that has paralysed the process is a fundamental disagreement between the Ministry of IT and the Competition Commission of Pakistan over which institution has the legal authority to frame the rules.

The Ministry’s position, supported by the PTA, rests on Section 57 of the Pakistan Telecommunication (Re-organisation) Act, which empowers the federal government to frame the rules, and on the Telecom Policy 2015’s explicit assignment of drafting responsibility to the Ministry.

The CCP’s position is that the Ministry lacks the mandate to frame competition rules, that competition regulation across all sectors of the economy, including telecommunications, falls within the CCP’s own jurisdiction under the Competition Act 2010.

In November 2025, the Islamabad High Court effectively resolved the legal question in the CCP’s favour. The court upheld the CCP’s jurisdiction over competition and deceptive marketing matters in the telecom sector, dismissing petitions filed by Jazz, Telenor, Zong, Ufone, and PTCL. It ruled that the CCP possesses overarching jurisdiction across all sectors of the economy, including telecommunications, and that the Competition Act 2010 and the Pakistan Telecommunication Act 1996 operate in distinct yet complementary domains, with PTA governing technical and operational matters and CCP governing anti-competitive conduct.

The court’s ruling settled the legal question but has not settled the institutional deadlock. The Ministry circulated a revised draft of the Telecom Competition Rules in January 2026. PTA submitted comments in March. Several meetings followed. The ministry shared another revised draft on July 7, 2026. PTA submitted its latest feedback on July 27. And the rules remain unfinished.

Why the Timing Could Not Be Worse

The decade-long absence of dedicated telecom competition rules has always been a regulatory gap. It has become a regulatory crisis by virtue of timing.

Pakistan’s telecom market is undergoing the most significant structural change in its history. The PTCL-Telenor merger, legally completed through an Islamabad High Court order, has reduced the number of major mobile operators from four to three and created a near-duopoly at the top of the market, with the merged PTCL entity and Jazz together controlling over 72 percent of mobile subscribers. Zong sits between them with 26 percent.

This consolidation was approved by the CCP with conditions, including the five-year independent third-party monitoring regime, precisely because concentration of this scale creates competition risks that need to be actively managed. Those risks are supposed to be managed within a regulatory framework that includes both the CCP’s cross-sector powers and PTA’s sector-specific authority. The sector-specific half of that framework, the Telecom Competition Rules, does not exist.

A market with three operators, the largest two of which together hold nearly three-quarters of subscribers, requires robust competition rules more urgently than a four-operator market with a more distributed share structure. The consolidation that has already occurred makes the absence of finalised rules more consequential.

The 5G context adds a further dimension. Pakistan completed its first 5G spectrum auction in March 2026, raising $507 million. The deployment of 5G infrastructure and the commercial disputes that will arise over wholesale access, infrastructure sharing, and competitive conduct in a new technology generation will occur in a regulatory environment without the sector-specific competition framework that was supposed to be in place before the market reached this point.

A Pattern Pakistan Cannot Afford

The Telecom Competition Rules are not the only victim of institutional turf wars over regulatory jurisdiction in Pakistan’s technology and digital economy space. The same dynamic, overlapping mandates, and unresolved authority questions and years of inconclusive meetings have delayed or weakened regulatory frameworks across the sector. The Right of Way legislation controversy, the PVARA licensing framework development, and the Electronic Transactions Amendment Bill deferral each reflect a pattern in which institutional competition for jurisdiction consumes the time and energy that should be spent on the actual regulatory work.

The IHC’s November 2025 ruling on CCP’s jurisdiction provides a legal foundation that should enable the Ministry and CCP to clarify their respective roles and move the rules forward. The Ministry continues to draft rules under its statutory authority. The CCP continues to assert its competition enforcement powers. The question of how their respective instruments interact, and which takes precedence when they conflict, remains unresolved in practice even if the legal hierarchy has been established in principle.

What Industry Observers Are Saying

Industry observers have been consistent in their assessment: the absence of sector-specific competition rules has prolonged regulatory uncertainty at precisely the moment when the market needs clarity most. The PTCL-Telenor merger has created a new competitive landscape. The 5G rollout is creating new infrastructure dynamics. The government is pursuing digital economy reforms and foreign investment. All of these developments require a stable, predictable competition regulatory framework as their foundation.

Investors evaluating Pakistan’s telecom sector need to know what the rules are. Operators planning infrastructure investment need to understand what access obligations they face and what protections they have against competitor conduct. New entrants, including potential MVNO operators, whose CCP’s merger conditions are supposed to facilitate this, need a legal framework that defines their rights and the obligations of infrastructure owners toward them.

None of that clarity exists in sector-specific form. The CCP’s general competition powers provide a backstop, but general competition enforcement is slower, more case-by-case, and less predictive than a sector-specific rules framework designed for telecommunications.

The Bottom Line

Ten years is too long to draft a set of competition rules for any sector. For Pakistan’s telecom sector, which has, in that decade, gone from four competitive operators to a near-duopoly, completed a 5G spectrum auction, absorbed a major merger, and launched a rebranding exercise that will give the country’s second-largest operator a name most Pakistanis have never heard, the delay is not just administrative failure. It is a governance failure that has left the regulatory framework governing one of Pakistan’s most economically significant sectors incomplete at the moment when it is needed most. The IHC has resolved the jurisdictional question in law. What remains is for the Ministry of IT and the CCP to resolve it in practice and to produce, finally, the rules that Pakistan’s telecom market has been waiting for since 2015.