Five years ago this week… Faultline warned that the European Commission inadvertently reshaped the Dutch telecom market by clearing Liberty Global’s path for the VodafoneZiggo joint venture. The tie-up between Vodafone Netherlands and Ziggo created a fully-fledged quad-play challenger to KPN, combining mobile scale with fixed broadband and TV. We argued in 2016 that KPN would be forced into higher capex and marketing spend just as revenues were sliding, leaving a two-player converged market with T-Mobile Netherlands—then owned by Deutsche Telekom—exposed as a mobile-only outlier. Present day, the Dutch market did indeed consolidate further, and convergence became the European norm. Vodafone cashes out of Dutch JV: It just so happens that exactly five years later, Vodafone is selling its 50% stake in VodafoneZiggo to Liberty Global for €1 billion ($1.2 billion), plus 10% in a new Benelux entity. Liberty plans a full spin-off of Ziggo Group by 2027, giving Vodafone a tidy…