Mr President, can I say first of all how much I welcome what Mr Bolkestein has just said about the Commission taking a very thorough look at all the complex and intersecting pieces of legislation that are going to affect the new world in which we are living – the new world of electronic commerce. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend part of the hearings on 4 and 5 November and the numbers of people involved and the quality of the contributions show how seriously people were taking this issue. That is a reflection of the concern that was felt about the initial approach. My colleague, Mrs Wallis, who is preparing our report, will be speaking later and I do not want to anticipate or steal her thunder. We will be discussing that later and I know, Commissioner, you will have seen some elements of it already. The point I want to make is not from a lawyer's perspective, because I am privileged on the Committee on Legal Affairs, under Mrs Palacio’s chairmanship, to be one of the few people who are not lawyers. I should like to put forward a perspective about the issues from the point of view of both business and consumers. The key word in this question that we pose to you, Commissioner, is balance. If we look around the world, the advent of electronic commerce or electronic communications is significantly changing the balance of the marketplace. The balance is moving strongly in favour of consumers. We are all becoming empowered consumers because that new communications technology is giving us enormous power to shop globally, to compare prices, to make our decisions on the basis of large amounts of easily accessible information. Those of you who have not experienced that should certainly do so because electronic commerce, because of this combination of computing power and information, is allowing people to compare offers and shop in a way they have never done before. I give you a simple illustration. It is one that is relevant to what we are doing in legislation in the whole public sector. The office of telecommunications in the United Kingdom has a website where consumers can go and compare the details offered by all the different telecommunications companies. You put in the details of your telephone usage and you compare the different offers – that is the sort of power we will soon have available to us. This new generation of empowered consumers is not going to be concerned about arguments that we might have as legislators about principles of justice and applicable law because, as Mrs Palacio pointed out, access to the courts is not uppermost in the minds of most people who shop, on the Internet or anywhere else. Before making a decision about a purchase, customers are going to want to be confident that the organisation they are dealing with provides strong conditions and guarantees and access to redress. If it is a relatively unfamiliar brand – and we should be encouraging small companies to use electronic commerce to make offers to consumers – those consumers may well want the security of some sort of approved mark, an E-trader mark, such as that, for example, which the British Consumer's Association is promoting very successfully. We shall give them great credit for that. That is the sort of initiative we need to be encouraging across the European Union. That is something I would ask the Commissioner to take up as part of this whole range of issues associated with consumer legislation. People will want to deal with organisations that handle problems and complaints with the same speed and efficiency with which they made their purchase on the Internet. They will want simple and effective redress and access to someone who will sort out their problem. There is one certainty about electronic commerce and that is that it moves very fast indeed. New formats of product and service are brought to market much more quickly than ever before and our job as legislators in this Parliament is to encourage that dynamism and not to slow it down. We want to encourage consumers to use electronic information in their shopping decisions, and to encourage firms of every size, particularly the small enterprises, to participate in electronic commerce. That is clearly going to require us to rethink our regulatory framework.

Political group: PPE-DE