Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-12-10-Speech-1-095"
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"en.20011210.5.1-095"2
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"I would like to thank the rapporteurs on behalf of my group and on behalf of Parliament for the tremendous work that they have done on their joint reports. When we look at what the Council agreed upon in Lisbon and the new European initiative in particular and consider utilising the advantages which would accrue to Europe from the telecommunications revolution, we can see that there are many great opportunities out there to be grasped, but they require proper order, proper rules and proper regulation to ensure their use for the benefit of all. At this point I would particularly like to congratulate Commissioner Liikanen for the innovative measures that he has brought forward and the way that he is striving to bring Europe into the 21st century. I suppose it is appropriate that a man of his origins should be doing that.
However, there are a number of dangers and risks and in particular, I want to deal with two aspects. First there is the universal service aspect – the universal obligation that my colleague Malcolm Harbour was talking about. I will take a slightly different perspective. There is a risk relating to competition, with new regulations and new rules being brought in, that there will be cherry-picking of the most valuable markets, the most valuable layers, and suddenly larger urban areas will benefit whilst rural areas and peripheral areas will lose out.
On top of that, as already mentioned by Malcolm Harbour, there is the question of disabled access. Companies and institutions must be forced to adapt their services to suit the needs of the consumers and particularly those consumers to whom the Internet and the telecommunications revolution could open the most possibilities of all by bringing them into the real world and bringing them into dialogue.
A third area that I wish to focus on is the risk of creating new illiterates or new gaps between those people who have computer and electronic skills and those who do not. We have a population in Europe today that is ageing: we have a huge middle-aged and ageing population that may not have the training and the skills necessary to usefully adapt to computers, electronic commerce and so on. What is happening in our schools and providing access in education is very important, but we must look to new ways of bringing in the middle-aged and the aged into the process.
Finally, the eSchola initiative is a great one. – I hope it can be extended to bring in older people and more peripheral areas. My last point is that, when we speak about consumers, let us ensure that we speak about all of the consumers of Europe not just those in the largest urban areas."@en1
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