Debates

Wednesday, 2 April 2014 - Brussels

European single market for electronic communications - Measures to reduce the cost of deploying high-speed electronic communications networks - Electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the internal market (debate)

  Amelia Andersdotter, on behalf of the Verts/ALE Group. – Mr President, today we are discussing the future of electronic communications in Europe. In Parliament we have repeatedly expressed our commitment to the protection and promotion of human rights on the Internet. We repeatedly express our concern for there to be competitive equal opportunities on the European markets, and we support innovative start-ups which can create a European digital sphere.

An important step in this direction is safeguarding net neutrality. Therefore I urge all colleagues to support the amendments on net neutrality which have been tabled by a broad coalition of political groups. Nevertheless there appear to be loopholes in the legislation which could distort the market in an unfair way. The European Union must find ways of combining successfully the European political principal of distributed, equal cooperation with the Internet technical principle of distributed, equal cooperation. But where is the strategy for this?

In all of the three proposals we see proposals which have been badly prepared by the Commission. The lack of strategy and leadership from the Commissioner has caused confusion. We now have security by bureaucracy rather than security by transparency, which would otherwise be universally supported by research.

In future Parliament should consider changing its rules of procedure to pre-empt these large, spectacular and hasty revisions of important base legislation, as with Connected Continent. We could consider not adopting first reading positions on proposals less than one year after they were tabled. We should consider not accepting proposals for which the Commission Impact Assessment Board has not given the green light. Our institutions ...

(The President cut off the speaker)