Malcolm Harbour (ECR), blue-card answer. – Yes, certainly, I was involved in drafting the provisions in 2009 about quality of service and giving the regulators the ability to intervene if they saw that service quality was being used in an anti-competitive way, and indeed if operators had already blocked, restricted or throttled services in a discriminatory way. BEREC, the regulators, have already told the Commissioner that they feel they have powers to deal with the net neutrality problems that are currently emerging.

I think that the problem that we will look at closely in the Commissioner’s new proposal is whether she is trying to anticipate potential problems as opposed to dealing with existing problems. It is not the philosophy of telecom legislation to try and anticipate problems but to allow the market to work, as she would agree.