New Regulations on the Concession Contract Regarding the Natural Gas Supply. Connection to the Natural Gas Network in Romania Cătălina Georgeta Dinu Faculty of Law, Transilvania University of Brasov, Romania catalina13.dinu@gmail.com ABSTRACT: The supply of natural gas and electricity continued to be a difficult goal for many household consumers in Romania, despite sufficient natural resources. The cause was represented by the existence of a monopoly over the provision of those two services, but, due to the liberalization of the market for the supply of natural gas and electricity, several benefits are to be implemented in this area. In this sense, both the primary and the secondary legislation have been already amended, and the future domestic and non-domestic customers expect the unblocking of the situation in the shortest possible time, issue that implies the efficient mobilization of all public authorities and of the system distribution operators. Therefore, we will analyze these new legal provisions and how they will influence the already concluded concession contracts, but also whether they will improve the quality of life of the applicants. KEYWORDS: concession contract, public service, natural gas, applicant, operator Public Service It is worldwide known that the public service has been identified, as a rule, as an activity of general interest undertaken by the administration or by a private person who has the prerogatives of public power, in order to satisfy the public interest. The implications of the functioning of a public service are major, starting from its essential character of activity of general interest. That is why, through its decision, the Constitutional Court of Romania specified that the state must ensure the control mechanisms of private activities that fulfil attributions related to the organization of a public service. The administration of the public service by an individual must always be aimed at satisfying a public interest (Avram 2003, 90; Goodnow 2005, 10), even if that individual obviously seeks to obtain a personal profit. In other words, the desired gain must not contradict the general interest and the concession must not lead to the destruction of public wealth and national heritage. Currently, the Romanian legislator has given up the notion of public service, substituting it with the one of service, in accordance with the transposed Directive EU/23/2016, but this is only a terminological difference. A second criterion for identifying the public service is the entrustment by the public authority of the performance of the public service. The public service can be performed exclusively by the public law authority that values the goods on the public domain, or it can function by involving a private activity. With the increasing involvement of the state in specific activities of the private sector, but also with the involvement of private companies in areas that once represented the exclusive jurisdiction of the state (Dinu 2016, 251), the delimitation between public services that were either the attribute of direct implementation by public authorities or the attribute of accepting their realization through private structures, has been blurred. In an extensive interpretation of the scope of public services that can be left to the management of the latter structures, G. Jéze (Dupuis, Guédon and Chrétien, 2011, 553) even admitted the concession to a private individual of the monopolized public service (for example, the manufacture of weapons for the defence of the country), arguing that public services, the