Every night around midnight, Roberto Viola sits down at his electric piano and plays for hours. Neighbors don’t complain, because only he hears the music through headphones.
Like the silent piano, Viola doesn’t make a lot of racket around Brussels. The action is out of earshot.
On September 1, Viola rose to head of DG Connect, the European Commission department that regulates communications networks, content and technology. As the director general, he leads more than 1,000 public servants who have the daunting and history-defying mission of implementing a digital single market strategy to kick-start Europe’s tech and telecoms sectors.
That makes him one of the most powerful men in the European Union, with an almost unparalleled ability to change the direction of tech policy.
His predecessors failed more often than they succeeded. Driving change in tech and telecoms across the EU’s 28 countries is usually blocked, delayed or watered down by the European Council and Parliament.
In terms of difficulty, it’s up there with playing Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit.
The sweeping telecoms reforms unveiled in 2013 are a classic example. Only two proposals were finally adopted this year.
Perhaps that’s why Viola claims his vision for a departmental shake-up is limited to “fine adjustments,” not a “revolution.”
While few describe him as a visionary, many talk about a man who is meticulous in his attention to detail, pragmatic, apolitical and diplomatic to a fault.
Above all, he is in control.
‘Roberto doesn’t delegate’
Viola’s career has been one long tight-rope walk, and he’s managed to keep his balance on the way up, even during a perilous period as Italy’s media regulator under Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
“You will never find a powerful assistant to Roberto Viola,” said a person who has known Viola professionally for over a decade. He requested anonymity as he is still in the telecoms industry. “Roberto does things personally, he doesn’t delegate.”
Those who know Viola well believe change is coming to DG Connect.
“My guess is Roberto will invent things that previous innovators in DG Connect have not invented,” said former director general, Robert Madelin. “I’m sure it won’t be business as usual, as business as usual is too boring.”
Speaking of the man who took his job, Madelin said, “Roberto is a man you could go tiger hunting with. He’s the sort of person who has your back.” Madelin is now the senior adviser for innovation at the European Political Strategy Centre.
Viola, who sleeps about 4 ½ hours a night, has a brain hardwired for technology and two patents to prove it.
A telco fortune lost
Born and educated in Rome, Viola studied engineering before being recruited at 25 by the European Space Agency. There, he invented a communications system that was one of the bases for 3G wireless technology and a satellite system that was the genesis for satellite radio.
All Viola has to show for it are a couple of medals from the Space Agency and €1 that he received for each patent. He came up with the ideas while working for the ESA, which kept the rights to them.
While both 3G Internet and satellite radio may have their roots on this side of the Atlantic, America reaped the technological and financial rewards. The ESA granted licenses to the technology to U.S. companies, which moved more quickly to build 3G mobile networks. The EU’s own 3G push was hamstrung by countries that quibbled over standards, timing and access to spectrum.
“I’m very happy that someone became a billionaire in the United States, and again another euro and a medal for me,” he joked.
“Traditional actors have connections in politics and see innovation as a threat.”
And while it became huge in the U.S., satellite radio never really took off here. “The radio operators saw the satellite system as a competitor. This is something that often happens in the history of Europe,” Viola lamented. “The fact that it was not realized in Europe eventually was a really sour but important lesson for me.”
The bitter taste of his under-appreciated patents still seems to drive Viola. His professed goal is a regulatory environment that promotes innovation and competition. But he will face stiff opposition from Europe’s incumbents, who are desperate to hold on to profits under attack from nimbler, younger local upstarts and the behemoths from across the Atlantic.
“There’s a little bit of difficulty in innovation because sometimes the traditional actors are the ones that have connections in politics and they see innovation as a threat,” he said. “We always have to be vigilant on this, to convince decision makers that innovation is going in the right direction.”
The Berlusconi years
In 1999, Viola left the space agency and joined the Agcom, the Italian regulator for phone, TV and radio. He worked as the director of regulation and technical director, and became secretary general in 2004. Before he left the agency in 2012, he also served as chair of the European Radio Spectrum Policy Group, was a member of the Body of European Telecom Regulators board, and chairman of the European Regulatory Group.
Viola had one tricky overlord: Berlusconi. In addition to being the Italian prime minister, the flamboyant media tycoon was the founder and controlling shareholder of Mediaset, Italy’s largest commercial broadcaster, which led to repeated allegations of conflicts of interest and corruption.
While Berlusconi’s reign wrecked numerous political careers, Viola emerged with his reputation intact, according to sources from both sides of the political spectrum from the time. They said that Viola kept his head down, didn’t stir trouble, and stayed to the letter of the law.
“He followed instructions,” a telecoms insider active in those days said. “There were some very controversial decisions being taken by the government with the support of Parliament in the Berlusconi years. Viola was a professional and he stuck to the rules.”
A particularly stormy period stretched from the mid-2000s to 2012, during Italy’s switch from analog to digital television. In 2006, the European Commission put the country on notice, alleging a law governing Italy’s transition to digital TV discriminated in favor of incumbent broadcasters. Accusations swirled that Agcom was overly protective of Berlusconi’s interests.
Then, with Viola at the helm, Agcom performed a turnaround. Between 2006 and 2007 the regulator reorganized, increasing staff numbers, setting up more transparent complaint investigation procedures, implementing new restrictions.
In 2007, Agcom took on Berlusconi’s Mediaset and public broadcaster RAI, the two largest players in Italian TV.
It strongly recommended that the companies give up a share of their analog frequencies to smaller challengers in the market. Given that the analog to digital switchover had already begun, in effect freeing up the spectrum Agcom wanted released to the market, it was as much a political statement as a regulatory one. Neither Berlusconi nor RAI would be given a free ride.
Reflecting on that period, Viola conceded he faced constant pressure from left- and right-wing powerbrokers.
“The risk of being seen for one party or the other party was always there, and you being the referee, the regulator — this is not a very nice thing if people start to think you are going in one direction or the other,” said Viola, who closes his eyes when thinking deeply.
“But being independent is a state of mind, first of all,” he said. “The respect comes if you are completely convinced that someone has the stamina, the willingness to remain independent.”
Fast rise in Brussels
Viola joined the Commission as deputy director-general of DG Connect in 2012. While it’s not uncommon for the most important positions in Connect to go to former national telecoms regulators, the announcement of his promotion to the top job just three years into his stint in Brussels was a surprise.
Speculation was rife about how a relative newcomer so quickly landed a job usually reserved for Commission stalwarts.
One theory: Madelin’s reported clash with Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s chief of staff Martin Selmayr over the abolition of the post of Chief Scientific Adviser was his undoing and Viola’s ticket to the top.
He has the cheeky smile of a schoolboy caught sneaking a forbidden treat.
Others say Madelin was a divisive figure within the department and disliked by his boss, Günther Oettinger, commissioner for the digital economy and society.
The Commission and Madelin dispute this, with both camps saying that the relationship between the Oettinger and Madelin was, and remains, positive. Madelin told POLITICO: “We have worked very well together and are doing so still.”
Others speculated Viola benefited from his nationality. As the most senior Italian bureaucrat in the directorate generals, he was the country’s only shot at a top role.
Viola bristled at that notion.
“This sort of strange, Brussels-bubble way of thinking, that you can be a top manager if some national flag would move, is a little bit a caricature of how things are,” he said. “The most important thing that the College [of Commissioners] is looking at, and the president was absolutely clear in this whole process, is the qualities of people.”
The man behind TSM
While Italian by nationality, Viola doesn’t look it. His face — round, with a broad forehead and slightly downturned, blue-grey eyes — is suggestive of eastern European roots. He has the cheeky smile of a schoolboy caught sneaking a forbidden treat; it makes him look younger than his 55 years. He fiddles, talks with his hands, gesticulating with a pen to emphasize a point.
Viola does not have an Italian temperament.
“I’m told I have a British-type approach to problems. I like understatements,” he said.
Those who know the inner workings of DG Connect agree on one point: Viola was pulling the department’s levers before he became director general.
One former Parliament staffer says that while Madelin was rarely seen in negotiations over the telecoms single market package, Viola was an ever-present figure.
“It was mainly Viola coming to Parliament. He really knows how to speak to MEPs. He knows all of them, he calls several by their first names,” said the staffer, who asked for anonymity because she continues to work with DG Connect. “He was the one who was always sent there to present proposals. My boss could always call him when needed.”
These relationships served him well in negotiations over the two remaining elements of the telecoms single market package, a ban on roaming charges and the establishment of open Internet rules. While Parliament and Council jostled over detail, Viola pressed the Commission’s line: innovate or die out.
Several sources said Viola was key during the final, 12-plus-hour negotiation session in June between the Council, Parliament and Commission.
“We went through moments where it seemed there was no way to go through, but he was always showing determination to go on,” recalled Pilar del Castillo, the Parliament’s rapporteur for the reforms. “He was able to find solutions without losing dominion of the goal to be achieved.… There is no doubt that Viola is one of the main people responsible for this.”
Viola said he learned the art of diplomacy during the rough times at Italian regulator Agcom.
“This is one of the reasons why maybe I’m a decent negotiator,” he said, “because keeping the balance, keeping away from pressures of all kind, has been an extremely difficult exercise.”