Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-05-23-Speech-3-064"
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"en.20070523.3.3-064"2
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".
Madam President, this is a good day for Parliament, with a good consensus to get rid of market failure and to guarantee consumer protection. Permit me to respond briefly to the questions that have been raised.
Allow me to conclude with an appeal to telephone operators: I should like to ask them not to wait any longer and to enter into a genuine competition to offer the best roaming tariff to their consumers, a tariff below the ceilings on which Parliament is going to decide today.
The first thing is that we are not fixing prices; we are setting ceilings under which competition will have ample room to offer attractive price packages. I would also underline that the consensus reached today is very close to the Commission’s original proposal but with the flexibility, which the Commission welcomes, for customers to choose other packages when they wish.
There has been some criticism of the regulation of prices at retail level. It is true that this is a very exceptional circumstance, which has to be taken into consideration when there is a market failure. Here we have a market failure at European level. We very often have market failure at national level, and then the national regulators regulate retail prices. So what we are doing at European level is also done regularly at national level.
There was a question as to why the Commission is doing nothing against cartels. The Commission is acting; my colleague Mrs Kroes has investigated them under competition rules. In the case of roaming, it is much more efficient to work with ex ante regulation, and that this is effective has been shown by the fact that it has been possible to come up with a piece of legislation after just 10 months of work.
Many colleagues also raised the question of regulating roaming data communications. I can assure Parliament that during the next 18 months the national regulators will monitor the price of data communications and they will report to the Commission. I hope that today will be a wake-up call for operators also in terms of data roaming, and I hope that they will bring down those prices so that we will not have to intervene on that issue.
Madam President, I will say just a few words in German. I am delighted that Mr Langen has abandoned his resistance and at last agreed to a compromise, something that he found difficult but has nevertheless – I think – managed to accomplish.
To my friend Mr Wuermeling I would like to say that I really do ask the Council to get its skates on and get the regulation published in the Official Journal as soon possible – by which I do not mean only at the end of June, but a good deal earlier.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is a great day for Parliament, for a Parliament that is united in defending Europeans beyond the usual political divisions. It is an excellent thing and, as a former MEP, I am pleased to see it.
It is also a great day for the European institutions, which are demonstrating their ability to act in the common interest, quickly, effectively and as one. It is a great day for Europeans, who are seeing the Europe of the people and the Europe of practical projects in operation. Finally, it is of course a great day for consumers, whether they be tourists or business travellers: they have seen their European institutions right the failure of the roaming market with capped Eurotariffs and price transparency. They will be able to see the effect of this action because their telephone bills are going to decrease greatly. With today’s decision, one of the last barriers of Europe has come down, that of overbilling, which penalises those citizens who exercise their right to free movement."@en1
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