Mr President, Commissioner Liikanen, the e-Europe initiative by the European Commission is to be welcomed in principle. We all agree that new technologies will lead to extensive change, not only in our business life but in all aspects of our social life. It is also true that the evolution from industrial society to information society cannot be halted and that it therefore makes political sense to prepare Europe for the information society as best we can. I therefore expressly welcome the statement in the e-Europe initiative that its prime objective is to accelerate the positive transformation to the information society in the European Union and gear the transformation towards social and regional integration. The European Commission sets out ten measures in its communication on the e-Europe initiative, which should level the playing field in the run up to the information society in Europe. As welcome as the individual measures are, they need to be structured as a whole and clear priorities need to be set for our policy. This includes clearly differentiating which tasks the European Union can and must take care of itself and which tasks come within the jurisdiction of the individual Member States, taking account of the fact that some Member States and regions have been promoting the new technologies and fostering their acceptance by their citizens for years now. In this respect, the summit in Lisbon should table recommendations to the individual states, without imposing comprehensive obligations or heavy financial burdens. What must the European Union do within the framework of the e-Europe initiative? In my opinion, the following priorities should be taken care of by the Union and should have been addressed as core points in Mrs Read’s report, for which I should like, at this point, to thank her. First: we must create an open, modern, high-performance multimedia infrastructure. The policy objective must be to ensure that Europe has a modern, high-performance infrastructure which allows valuable quality telecommunications services to be supplied and demanded from the telephone via the PC and television. This includes cheaper Internet access for all the citizens of Europe, which means fostering even more competition in local networks, for example by unbundling customer access. It also means that all platforms must be made accessible to service providers at competitive prices; this might include making television cables available. It also means that the policy regarding frequencies in Europe will need to be reviewed and we will need to take a more strategic approach based on economic principles, as you have suggested, Commissioner. But, in so doing, we must not, of course, forget commercial applications which are generally provided in the public interest, such as public service radio. On the contrary, this must be taken into account when frequencies are being allocated so that it can fulfil its purpose as an opinion-forming institution which provides a platform for a variety of opinions. Secondly: we must quickly create a legal framework for electronic commerce. This means that we must deal swiftly with legislative proposals pending, such as the e-commerce directive or the directive amending copyright protection. However, caution is required in the legislative area in that we must not over-regulate; in other words, the first question with future legislative proposals should always be, do we actually need this? Thirdly: we need an e-Europe test bench for European initiatives. I have already referred to the fact that the changes in information technology and the new media affect all areas of life. Consequently, it is advisable to set all initiatives at European level on the e-Europe test bench. In other words... (The President cut the speaker off) Mr President, I apologise. Please be so kind as to allow me to finish my sentence. I have inadvertently run over time, but allow me to use my closing sentence to stress once again that I welcome the e-Europe initiative and to say that the suggestions which I had made would have been taken into account in my intervention.

Political group: PPE-DE