EU Mulls Breaking Up Vital Telecom Reform Package

IDG News Service — The European Commission may break up a package of reforms for the telecom sector in order to salvage elements of it, after the European Parliament torpedoed the original plan for a big bang of changes Wednesday.

Parliamentarians supported everything in the package, which is designed to update the rules to suit the modern world of high-speed Internet access. All, that is, except for one: the ability of national governments to ban citizens from the Internet for illegally downloading copyright-protected music and video without first taking them to court.

The item isn't even central to the overall package, which deals mainly with issues such as how to share radio spectrum among new mobile technologies, the creation of an E.U.-wide telecom regulator, boosting healthy competition among service providers and the protecting of people's privacy online.

Nevertheless, the big bang approach required total agreement on all aspects between the Parliament and the national governments in order to get adopted. Wednesday's plenary meeting of the Parliament was the last opportunity to get such an agreement before Parliamentarians head back to their constituencies to prepare for next month's European Parliament election.

For the past two years E.U. lawmakers and the telecom industry have argued that it is vital to get the reforms adopted without delay, because existing laws dating back to 2002 are out of date and are hampering the rapid pace of change in the sector. The urgency intensified last year when Europe's economy plunged into recession. Rapid roll-out of high-speed broadband networks and greater competition in the telecom sector would help get the whole economy back on its feet, the argument went.

There is still a small chance that the package could be approved before the June elections, but it would require national governments agreeing to the Parliament's insistence that the policing of the Internet be done through the proper judicial authorities. This is unlikely because two of the biggest countries in the 27-nation block -- France and the U.K. -- are pushing for greater powers to curb the downloading of illegal content.

Next week, for example, the French senate is expected to pass a law dubbed the "three strikes and you are out" law, that would see illegal downloaders banned from the Internet after being caught three times by a government-appointed authority -- not a court.

"You can't force a national government to force its courts to act. The MEPs that voted for this amendment got carried away by fantasies that get us nowhere," said Pilar del Castillo, a right wing MEP from Spain who favored a compromise solution with the national governments that would have taken out all references to the courts.

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