Text tabled : A6-0272/2009

  Daniel Hannan (NI). - Mr President, I see that now Brussels wants to get its hands on the Internet. Commissioner Reding says that it is intolerable for the Internet to be regulated by a private company and, worse in her eyes, a private company with a contractual relationship with the American Commerce Department.

This is the same Commissioner Reding who, in a pretty crowded field, came up with what may be the single most fatuous argument I have heard from the Commission over the last term when she said that we needed a .eu common domain name in order to make the Internet more accessible to women.

The Internet works. The current system of domain names and registrations works brilliantly. Can you point to a single EU policy which is half as successful as the Internet? The common agricultural policy? The common fisheries policy? I think not. The prosecution rests.