An office that allocates monopolies it helped create

Indoklás

The NKOI was established in 2020 to operate a unified procedural and supervisory system for the state's concession activities — it runs tender procedures and concludes concession contracts for motorways, casinos, and waste management when the government designates it to do so.[^1] The body is the clearest example in the chapter of a regulator whose existence is evidence of an underlying problem rather than a solution to it. A concession is a state-granted exclusive right — to operate gaming, to collect motorway tolls, to handle waste in a designated area. The concession office exists because the state has chosen to convert a set of activities into state-licensed monopolies and then needs an apparatus to allocate the licences. The classical-liberal reading runs through the activities, not the office. Gaming does not require a concession regime; it requires ordinary licensing and the criminal law. Motorway operation is a genuine infrastructure question, but the concession is a contracting choice, not a necessity, and it can be handled by the relevant transport authority within ordinary public-procurement rules. Waste management is a competitive service in most of Europe; the concession regime constructs the local monopoly that the office then administers. Where the state stops constructing concession monopolies, the office that allocates them has nothing to allocate. The honest classification is phase-out parallel to the deregulation of the underlying concession regimes — the office winds down as the activities it licenses are returned to ordinary licensing or competitive procurement.