Public Policy Blog

Last week, EU Commissioner and Vice-President Neelie Kroes held in Brussels the final roundtable meeting with 35 top representatives of the ICT industry to see how to foster high-speed broadband roll-out in Europe and how to achieve the ambitious European Broadband objectives for 2020.

Under considerable media attention the e-G8 summit was held in Paris on May 24 and 25, the two days prior to the Deauville G8 summit of Heads of States, to discuss and propose a number of initiatives to highlight the importance of the Internet for our globalised world and economies.

I had the pleasure to attend the meeting representing Telefónica and believe that it is worth pointing out some interesting issues of the debates.

Since the Internet is increasingly playing an important role in the life of citizens and for our economy and business, it is not surprising that it is in the spotlight also of Public Policy activities. How to encourage investment and innovation, how to establish a level playing field for competition, and how to set the right model to govern consumer and user rights are some of the challenging questions that governments and regulators have to answer today.