Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-05-09-Speech-3-083-000"
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"en.20120509.17.3-083-000"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, one of the headlines in the Belgian press yesterday said that young people send an average of 71 text messages a day. That is a lot, even for a frequent text messager like me, but this tells you something about the kind of world young people live in. An extraordinary amount of text messages are being sent, but what you also see is a whole lot of people downloading data and reading newspapers on the train. This has simply become our way of life. We do not just make phone calls, we also send text messages and we use an awful lot of data services.
With that in mind, it is strange to see that, up till now, we have not found a solution to the associated high prices we pay, the high domestic prices – certainly in my country. Secondly, it is totally unacceptable from a European perspective that we have found no solution to roaming rates. It is bizarre – as Mr Goebbels has very clearly pointed out – because there is no good reason why mobile phone services between Antwerp and Paris should be so much more expensive than those between Marseille and Paris. We all know that it has to do with a number of large corporate groups who earn outrageous profits as a result. We are taking a step forward and it actually makes no difference to me, as a modern Social Democrat, if the cat is grey or black as long as she catches mice, and as long as the problem is resolved.
We want competition. We want an open market. If we fail to accomplish those two objectives, then we will set price caps. We are doing that today and this will at least ensure that prices go down by the summer and that they reach more normal levels.
In the long run, this Parliament, and certainly this group in Parliament, wants to see a complete abolition of roaming rates. We have agreed to make this a reality by 2016 and you and your team, in particular – because this will stretch into the next parliamentary term – will be held to account on that score. National rates, too, must be drastically reduced, because downloading data, making calls and text messaging is a right and our consumers should not have to pay too much for it."@en1
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