Mr President, honourable Members, unlike Mr Posselt, I do not represent the endangered media centre of Munich, I represent the media centre of Cologne. And if I am not from Cologne itself, then neither is Mr Posselt from Munich itself; however, as a Rheinlander like Mrs Hieronymi, I have a regional connection just like Mr Posselt. And the only reason I am standing here talking on cultural policy issues is because I have had to jump into the breach and replace my honourable friend Karin Junker who is ill and whose illness is too serious for her to be here. So, Mr President, if you hear me making a speech that is completely off the mark, attacking my honourable Christian Democrat friends in the usual battle of principles between left and right, it is because I am not the expert in this particular field that I consider myself to be in other areas. (Murmurs) Thank you for your friendly show of agreement. Mrs Junker has instructed me to say the following on her behalf: the audiovisual sector is a growth market and a powerful economic factor. Mr Harbour made it perfectly clear in his speech that this is not just a question of the configuration of the market, it is a question of who on the market is exercising what influence and where. To give you a statistic: EUR 65 billion is the estimated turnover in the audiovisual sector alone this year in terms of gross domestic product. And the audiovisual industry is an employment sector, employing 950,000 people. It is this sector that will regulate access to information for the broad mass of people in the future. The average person, so Karin Junker tells me, watches 206 minutes' television a day and listens to the radio for 3.5 hours. I do not qualify as an average person. (Applause) The objective we must work towards, as several honourable Members have explained, is that of a single European API or Application Programming Interface, to give it is proper name. So just as we have a single mobile telephone system, the so-called GSM system, we need one API and not 15 different APIs in the European Union. If we want a competitive market, then we need a single system. Which is why the difference between us and Mr Harbour is easy to explain, because what Mr Harbour has said is precisely the position of someone who insists that isolationism, of an insular nature, will obstruct the creation of this API. MHP is the only open, interoperable standard which meets the requirements which need to be imposed on this system. The European Commission should, as the Commissioner has already explained in detail in his reply to the five questions put by Mr Rocard, quickly take the initiative and introduce this standard. I share Mr Posselt's view: if the Member States fail to make a move on this issue in time, then we must take the initiative. The comment that television is the number one source of information does not just hold true for viewers during election broadcasts on the eve of elections in the Federal Republic of Germany; access to television, access to this democratic, pluralistic information system is a fundamental democratic right of all European citizens and needs to be anchored in the plurality of democracy. Access must be guaranteed, irrespective of the form of television on offer in the future. And if the future of television is digital, then access to this digital television system is a basic question of democratic rights, plurality and the freedom of self-determination of our citizens on information matters. This is the only way of guaranteeing in future that, on the one hand, market suppliers will be able to offer all consumers a complete range and, on the other hand, our citizens the consumers will be able to make use of what is on offer with the greatest possible freedom of choice. We European Socialists here in this Chamber would like to remind Commissioner Liikanen that he promised to implement a single standard by 2004. If the media sector cannot agree on a uniform approach, then we shall go one step further. As Mr Posselt said and as Mrs Echerer said. Commissioner, the European Socialists in this Chamber therefore call on you to act as quickly as possible so that we can make progress on one of the fundamental questions for the future of a European information society as quickly as possible, but also in as pluralistic and democratic a manner and, my dear Mr Harbour, as uniformly as possible. (Applause)

Political group: PSE