Mr President, I am very pleased to be participating in this debate, not as a member of the Committee on Culture, Youth, Education, the Media and Sport but as one of the rapporteurs on the electronic communications package and a member both of the Committee on Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy and the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market. I should just like to say to colleagues from the Committee on Culture who are present that this is not an issue for that committee alone. It would be good if they encouraged more participation in their work within Parliament. This question was developed entirely within their committee. I am glad to have been able to work with many colleagues and to make a contribution. However, there is a much wider range of issues at stake here. Firstly, I sense a perception that this whole idea about a multimedia home platform (MHP) is somehow a silver bullet, a magic cure that will, in one sweep, create universal accessibility for digital television. Mrs Echerer gave us a hint of that just now. That is far from the reality. It is not like mobile telephony; it is not like introducing a GSM standard, because we already have digital television systems in the market, delivering services that consumers want to quite a high interactive standard. In my own country nine million people already have systems operating under other standards than MHP. Indeed, the final standard – the full interactive standard – for MHPs has not even been published, and yet colleagues here want to rush ahead and standardise it. That is not realistic. I also find a lack of realism about the whole idea that somehow we want to impose a particular business model on broadcasting. This resolution contains a rather unnecessary attack on vertical organisation and my group, and I hope Parliament, will reject that element. As the Commissioner said earlier, this is an issue on which I and other Members have worked in connection with the electronics communications package. We have put competitive instruments in place to stop vertical operators from abusing their dominant position in the marketplace. There are also must-carry obligations that we expect member governments to enforce. The first thing we should be saying to the Commission is that we want them to be enforced. They are critical. It is not up to us to enforce a particular business model. We are not there to do that. On the question of application interfaces and the technology, the key word is 'interoperability'. It is not a single standard, and just having a single standard does not mean you automatically get simple authoring or interoperability. We have three mediums in the United Kingdom already – cable, terrestrial digital – a powerful access for people to get onto the digital system – and satellite. Each of those has a different interface. The Commission needs to encourage what I call a toolkit for digital authors. That will allow digital authors to come on and have a common set of principles within which they can develop programmes for any platform. That is the sort of practical thing the Commission needs to work on. It certainly needs to monitor how MHP is developing and to see whether that needs further encouragement. However, we are already well down the road to the digital revolution already, and the sort of interference that is being implied by some colleagues here – I am pleased to say not in the resolution – will not help the way forward. We must be realistic about what is going on in the market-place and what consumers are buying now.

Political group: PPE-DE