VIA SATELLITE: Do you feel you have the foundations in place to create a strong media and information society in Europe?
REDING: We still need to make substantial progress with the reform of the EU telecoms, in place since 2002 and proposed for a review by the European Commission at the end of 2007. We are living in a world where communication technologies unite people across borders and where we need to deal more effectively with regulatory issues on a European level. We need quick and effective decisions in the name of competition and consumers.
Of course in the United States, where you have only one telecoms authority — the Federal Telecommunications Commission — decisions will be taken much quicker than in the EU, where we work according to a 27-plus-1 model. We have 27 national regulators plus the loose European Regulators Group, which is for the time being not at its best in terms of efficiency as it is bound by the consensus rule and, therefore, often only is able to arrive at slow, lowest common denominator decisions. This is not good news for European telecoms companies, which suffer as a result of this system under substantially higher regulatory costs and long procedures and therefore lose competitiveness vis-à-vis U.S. and Asian companies. What we therefore need in Europe is to end regulatory fragmentation where we do not need 27 or 28 set of rules any more, but only one. We need a one-stop-shop for European companies that want to invest into telecoms and build new networks.
The recent EU decision on mobile satellite services will certainly serve as a useful precedent for the EU telecoms reform. I see a lot of agreement both in the EU Council of the 27 Telecoms Ministers and in the European Parliament — which has an equal say with ministers on the matter — with my objective of creating a single telecoms market in Europe without regulatory borders for businesses and consumers, thereby paving the way for a level playing field for telecoms companies with cross-border activities and an open, innovative and borderless telecoms market for Europe’s 500 million consumers. The European Parliament, which always has the citizens’ interests in mind, has even come forward with an own proposal for a European telecoms authority called BERT (Body of European Regulators for Telecommunications). At the end of this reform process, I expect Europe as a whole to be stronger and more efficient as regards telecommunications and new high-speed Internet services.
VIA SATELLITE: Is there a growing appreciation within the European Commission on the role satellite technology can play on the media and communications landscape?
REDING: Satellites and satellite technology in today’s world are rocketing upwards. While the satellite industry is a 77 billion euro ($112 billion) market worldwide, it has been growing at 16 percent in 2007. Of this, satellite services alone generated approximately 38 billion euros ($55.3 billion) in global revenue. Mobile satellite services will change the future landscape of media and communications, as the potential of such systems is huge. They will allow us to experience services we did not know before: using a high-speed internet connection to watch TV or listen to the radio via your mobile phone or even to guarantee communication services in case the telecommunications infrastructure has broken down as a result of a natural disaster. Satellite communications are an integral and essential part of the new global information highway, and they will substantially improve high-speed communication throughout the entire EU.
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