Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-11-16-Speech-3-412-000"
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"en.20111116.23.3-412-000"2
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"Madam President, it is a privilege to be working once again with my distinguished colleagues on the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, because we had a very fruitful partnership in the reform of the telecoms package. I am very pleased that Mrs Trautmann and Mrs Pilar del Castillo Vera, who were jointly, with me, the three rapporteurs on the Telecoms Directive – sometimes rather unkindly known as the three musketeers for some reason – are together again and addressing this issue.
We have given the regulators those powers and they are invited to use them. Of course, one of the major achievements of the telecoms package was to have a body of European regulators – the BEREC that was in Mrs del Castillo Vera’s proposal – and they are the people whose job it is to ensure that that is being carried out.
There is a lot on the table. This is a good report and a good resolution, but the proof of the pudding will be in the implementation of what we have asked for.
My colleagues will remember that, from the side of the consumers’ and users’ rights reforms, together with the basic principles in the framework directive we spent a huge amount of time and energy crafting amendments to the existing telecoms framework to deal with some of the potential issues that might arise in a framework in which broadband speeds, access to much greater bandwidth of communications and ability to offer different ranges and types of services on the Internet might bring about the sort of anti-competitive behaviour which would restrict the rights of consumers to access and distribute content and services of their choice.
That indeed was the fundamental piece that was introduced into the framework directive itself. It is worth just recalling that – that ability of end users to access and distribute information and to run applications and services of their choice is absolutely at the heart of this whole debate about so-called net neutrality and the choices that were put on the table.
The Commission, at our invitation, has been following this very closely, but of course my fellow chairman, Herbert Reul, is quite right in saying that the test at the moment is to see how the reforms that we put in place in the Telecoms Package are actually working out in practice.
What were the issues that were put on the table to deal with ensuring that this open character of the Internet is maintained and continues to be delivered?
First of all there was the whole principle of ensuring competition – giving consumers choice of services, but above all actually being able to switch providers if they did not like the types of services that were on offer or indeed any restrictions that might be placed on access to certain types of services. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with having offers that may be limited in choice at a lower price, provided that consumers know what they are getting. That is the crucial point here. So within the universal service and users’ rights element we ensured that the ability to switch easily – and particularly if it was a voice service to take your number or indeed your internet address very speedily and quickly within one day – was enshrined within that.
Secondly, the transparency of the offers that consumers are getting is absolutely fundamental. The Commission has been consulting about, and a number of regulators have been looking at, the whole issue of what the actual advertised delivery speed of one’s connection is, what the management measures are and what service providers are doing to deal with times where there may be limitations of capacity in times of network overload. That applies particularly to mobile operators – as many of us will know.
That transparency of contract terms is a fundamental requirement of the telecoms package and we have asked the Commission to make sure that, in every country, regulators are enforcing those transparency and information requirements alongside the switching aspect.
Finally, in terms of what we put in – and colleagues will remember the famous Article 21 of the reform on the Users’ Rights Directive – we have actually given regulators, for the first time, the ability to intervene in the marketplace if they see that an operator is actively discriminating against a content carried on its networks that competes with content of its own. In other words, if an operator actually artificially degrades the quality of service provision for a particular service where it is providing a competing service. I think we would all agree that this is absolutely unacceptable. That is clearly discriminatory behaviour as regards quality of service on the Internet and undermines the whole principle of net neutrality."@en1
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