Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-09-06-Speech-3-188"
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"en.20000906.7.3-188"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to thank the Commissioner for firmly quashing the WorldCom-Sprint merger, which was the right thing to do. These cases have increased dramatically in number recently. In ten years the number of mergers has risen fivefold and there are about three hundred of them a year now. Mr Harbour presented the telecom package. It just shows what a furious pace this industry is moving along at. It demands a lot from all of us in terms of skills.
The telecommunications and IT sectors are special. It is not just a matter of pushing a cart; it is a quite exceptional field, because information is at present the most important tool of production. In addition, it involves, as we know very well from the Echelon case and others, the possibility of monitoring, and thus the possibility of the monitoring of people, which has also become a very important business. The other aspect to consider here is globalisation, which crosses state and cultural borders. These are in a way beyond the control and vigilance of everyone. Quite the opposite, as through them these companies can create a dependency, as that part of this business happens in people’s brains. It is an important new territorial conquest, and, for that reason, I would ask the Commission to be particularly careful with regard to these mergers. While we are aiming at deregulation here, Commissioner, companies are tending to re-regulate: to make new agreements about the market that bypass the democratic monitoring and control systems. As Mr Clegg said, there are obviously problems too between the European Union and the United States, such as the restriction on mergers in the case of Deutsche Telecom, which obviously has to be looked into."@en1
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