EU seeks e-trade without borders
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The European Commission unveils plans to make people feel safer buying things online from other countries.
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(InfoWorld) - The European Union's 27 national telecom authorities must submit plans to regulate the single European market by Feb. 16Â or face ceding those powers to the European Commission, Telecommunications Commissioner Viviane Reding has warned. The Commission wants the national regulators to join forces to form an E.U.-wide independent body akin to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. It gave them until mid February to submit plans so that it could draft legislation by July. "A European Union-wide regulator would be a temporary body. It would be disbanded once the transition to a single competitive telecoms market is over," said Martin Selmayr, Reding's spokesman, on Monday. Several of the national regulatory bodies have failed to prove they are independent from their governments and incumbent monopoly phone companies. Currently, the national regulators enforce Europe-wide telecom rules in their own countries. However, they take different positions in interpreting the same rules. The U.K., for example, has cracked down on former monopoly provider BT Group, while Commission officials complain that Germany has allowed Deutsche TelekomÂ to keep a grip on the fixed-line local loop and even receive permission to build a high-speed Internet network without sharing access with competitors. Some countries are creating their own telecom laws without consulting their E.U. neighbors. The German regulator, for example, has failed to stop the German government from proposing a law that would grant the former monopoly Deutsche Telekom protection from competition. Other countries have failed to transpose European telecom rules into their national statute books. In a letter to all national regulators sent at the end of last year, Reding warned that failure to submit a workable proposal for an FCC-type organization by Feb. 16 would leave her no choice but to propose greater authority for the Commission. Reding is conducting a review of all the laws agreed in the late 1990s designed to forge a single European telecom market out of all the national ones, with open competition throughout the E.U.
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The European Union wants greater access to the Chinese market, especially in the auto and textile industries, a ranking official with the European Commission said.
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The European Union urged member states on Tuesday to sign up to schemes to launch work on a new European heavy transport helicopter and next-generation satellite observation system from late 2008.
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The EU asks the WTO to intervene in its attempts to open the Indian market to wine and spirits exports.
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Easier cross-border business for SMEs The European Commission wants to create a form of company across Europe to make cross-border business easier to conduct for small firms.â¦
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Europeans seek assurances that company is respecting privacy rights of people whose data it retains.
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Trade, apart from peace and prosperity, is always held up as the great EU success story. If only the EU could get its act together in other areas, such as foreign affairs, it would be a global power, the argument runs.
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The recording industry is seeking legislation in Europe that would require the filtering of Internet connections to block the illicit transfer of copyrighted material and more.
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The European Commission will make  proposals by mid-2008 aimed at creating a single European  market in the burgeoning sector of online music, films and  games, it said on Thursday.
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Europe gives handout to boost competitiveness The European Union this week announced plans to pump â¬9bn into research on information and communications technologies.â¦
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Making many laws one The European Commission will overhaul European contract law to make internet selling easier, more reliable and more efficient.â¦
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The European Union called Monday for more movement from its partners in World Trade Organisation talks after WTO chief Pascal Lamy injected a sense of urgency into attempts to revive the negotiations.
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The European Union (EU) said on Thursday that further US efforts to eliminate trade and investment barriers would strengthen the transatlantic economic relationship.
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Any mandatory EU intervention to cut  the price of sending text messages or using the Internet while  traveling abroad would be limited to the wholesale level, the  European Union's top telecoms regulator said on Thursday.
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(InfoWorld) - The European Commission has warned its member states to beef up their efforts to cut spam, spyware and malicious software, after research showed that up to 85 percent of all e-mail received in the European Union is unsolicited.The findings come four years after the EU adopted anti-spam legislation in the form of the e-privacy directive. "It is time to turn the repeated political concern about spam into concrete actions to fight spam," Viviane Reding, the commissioner for Information Society and Media, said in a statement on Monday.If there is no improvement by this time next year, Reding will consider introducing new legislative measures to fight the scourge, she said.She pointed to the Netherlands as an example of how the current legal regime can be used to cut spam. Hollandâs spam-busting unit, known by the initials OPTA, has just five full-time staff and â¬570,000 (US$747,000) worth of equipment, and has succeeded in cutting spam by 85 percent. âI'd like to see other countries achieving similar results through more efficient enforcement,â Reding said.Finland was also singled out for praise. A filtering system there has cut the amount of spam to 30 percent of all e-mail, from 80 percent two years ago, the Commission said.âWe encourage other countries in the Union to develop similar filtering means,â said Martin Selmayr, Redingâs spokesman, at a press conference Monday.The Commission is urging other countries âto lay down clear lines of responsibility to use the tools available under E.U. law effectively." Better cooperation with enforcement authorities from other countries, including countries outside the Union, is essential to defeat the spammers, the Commission said.The U.S. remains the single biggest source of spam, accounting for 22 percent of all spam received in the EU, the Commission said. China is the second largest source, accounting for 13 percent. France and South Korea rank joint third at 6 percent.The U.S. and the EU have agreed to tackle spam through joint enforcement initiatives, the Commission said.Last year, Ferris Research estimated spam to cost â¬39 billion worldwide, while fellow researcher Computer Economics calculated malicious software to cost â¬11 billion worldwide.The Commission's latest communication on spam is available here in several languages.
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A new strategy for funding technology research in the European Union calls for the E.U. to pool its vast resources with those from private industry and individual member states in a public-private partnership.