Public Policy Blog

On 11 January 2012, European Commission adopted the 2012 Communication on e-commerce and other online services that aim to double the retails online sales and the weight of Internet sector in European GDP. The Communication identifies 5 priorities and is accompanied by a 16 goals action plan. As I already wrote in my post on Cloud [...]

We have identified three priority areas that regulators and policymakers will need to pay particular attention to during these months ahead. To be effective, any policy must allow sufficient flexibility at a national level, as a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach will be unlikely to succeed.

After the summer break, public policy issues are numerous for the ICT sector in this beginning of autumn 2011…Here is a brief overview of some of the main events and issues we will follow during the next weeks:

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.

As announced in our Blog, the first Digital Agenda Assembly took place at the nice Autoworld Centre in Brussels on 16-17 June. We were more than 1300 participants, and apparently 800 could not attend!

It was amusing to discuss and debate actions towards new technologies for a better future in Europe surrounded by old car and antique aircrafts…A nice and amazing constrast, I would say.

I suppose everyone would agree on the importance which education and skills for the use of ICT services plays in fulfilling the objectives of the Digital Agenda and Europe 2020 Strategy. It therefore comes without much surprise that at the 1st Digital Agenda Assembly last week the issue of Mainstreaming e-Learning in education and training was one of the hot topics discussed.

Last week we attended the first Digital Agenda Assembly, where a whole range of topics were discussed, and as part of our contribution to the debate, I wanted to look at the issue of a Digital Single Market for Europe. There is clearly great potential in a Single Market for digital content for Europe – [...]

After having launched almost a year ago the Digital Agenda for Europe , one of the seven flagship initiatives of the Europe 2020 Strategy and a roadmap for the increased usage of ICT services in Europe, the European Commission is organising the first Digital Agenda Assembly for the next 16-17 of June in Brussels.

Last year, the European Commission launched a plan, the Europe 2020 Strategy, to go out of the crisis and prepare EU economy for the coming decade. Concretely, the Union set five ambitious objectives – on employment, innovation, education, social inclusion and climate/energy – to be reached by 2020. In order to meet the targets, the [...]

Last week, The Council of Europe (CoE) and the European Commission (EC) organized a seminar-conference titled “Shared Social Responsibility: securing trust and sustainable social cohesion in a context of transition”. The event was open to public authorities, researchers, NGOs, civil society, etc. and aimed to confirm social cohesion as an objective for Europe. During the [...]