individual and concrete binding acts and making concrete recommendations, initiating and prosecuting cases and punishing offences that fall within its competency, monitoring compliance with the laws and regulations applicable to the communications sector, watching the activity by entities under its supervision and the operation of the telecommunications market, ARCOM shall issue such regulations as deemed indispensable to the fulfilment of its functions. In reality, the technical specificity of the communications sector, compounded by the ongoing innovations taking place therein, demands the existence of a wide space for the regulatory authority to intervene in the ordering of this sector. This is a normative power that rests on the recognition that ARCOM alone, as a result of its technical specialisation and accumulated knowledge, is prepared to respond in an expeditious and flexible fashion to the ongoing needs and changes in the sector, especially in the telecommunications market. The need to fit the sector in with the innovations brought about by the ongoing technical progress and globalisation also demand that the communications regulatory entity be supplied with tools that will give it greater flexibility, not only on the legal and material plane, but also at the level of the economic and financial regime and of contracts for the procurement of goods and services. In this sense, the legal regime adequate to ARCOM’s functions shall be a mixed regime combining public law prerogatives, indispensable to the exercise of its powers as an authority, with private law flexibility and efficiency, as ARCOM intervenes in an everchanging sector. Finally, without prejudice to a possible evolution of the regulatory framework applicable to the telecommunications and audiovisual sectors towards their convergence, the present Decree-Law also stipulates a modern and effective regulatory matrix, as well as a new flexible organisational model, consistent with the goals of the Government programme in terms of State reform. Thus, pursuant to section 116(d) of the Constitution, the Government enacts the following: Section 1 Establishment and nature 1. The Communications Regulatory Authority, hereinafter referred to as ARCOM, a public institution vested with legal personality, administrative and financial autonomy, and property of its own, is hereby established. 2. ARCOM is governed by the present Decree-Law and by its statutes, attached hereto as an integral part of the present Decree-Law. Section 2 Dissolution of the Directorate of Telecommunications, Ministry of Transport, Communications and Public Works