Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-05-17-Speech-3-269"
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"en.20000517.12.3-269"2
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"Mr President, I would like to thank Mr Reino Paasilinna for his thorough and excellent work in preparing this report, but I would also like to thank the Commission, which has done so much in support of this
Europe initiative and the expansion of the Internet. As the Commission has stated, there has been a lot of progress in the past few years in the EU telecommunications sector, but there is still a lot to be learnt where the mobile phone market is concerned. For instance, the availability of carrier pre-selection should be considered, and this facility made available to consumers, if studies confirm that they are going to benefit from this pre-selection. In future, it is incumbent on the Commission to ensure more vigorously than ever that the ‘roaming’ fees charged to users by operators are brought down in all EU countries to a sensible level based on actual costs. At the same time, the Commission must ensure that the fees collected from the operators remain under control.
The EU’s operating logic thus falls into two stages. The operators are not allowed to collect fees from the users, but neither must the public authority collect from the operators. The costs to the operator might become unreasonably high, should the new generation mobile spectrum be auctioned. Auctioning may also distort competition, if operators start making ‘tactical’ bids for the spectrum in order to harm the position of their competitors at auction. Therefore ‘beauty contests’ between the various operators are clearly more consumer-friendly alternatives. The latest UMTS auction in Great Britain, where prices soared sky high, will, in any case, set the alarm bells ringing. After the hammer has gone down, it is always the consumer who foots the bill – and that is exactly what we do not want, all of us being consumers ourselves. If we also want to introduce the Internet into schools and libraries and make it available for everybody on a very large scale in future, and if we also want to utilise its future potential in competition with the USA, the Internet will have to be affordable to all."@en1
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