Telecommunications Council to address key areas of information society
The Telecommunications Council which opened in Luxembourg on 18 June will be presented with some of the main advances tabled to establish an information society. The Commission, which will be represented by Enterprise and Information Society Commissioner, Erkki Liikanen, will put before the Council a number of proposals which address the means and parameters of reinforcing the information society in Europe. Amendments to the IDA (interchange of data between administrations) programme will be submitted to the Council for political agreement, following discussions on the areas of interoperability and guidelines. Should agreement be reached, adoption of the proposal by Council and Parliament, at first reading, should be possible. The Council is expected to adopt the trans-European telecommunications networks, or eTEN proposal. Once this has been done, the Commission is expected to launch a call for proposals in order to implement the guidelines of the programme. The eSafe proposal, which is geared towards dealing with illegal and harmful content on the Internet, will be explained to the Council. The Commission would like to see this extended by two years, with an addition to the budget of 13.3 million euro. The European Parliament is also looking at the details of the plan. The eEurope 2005 action plan, which aims to involve the public and private sectors more in the Information society, will also be discussed at the Council. This will be presented at the European Council in Seville on 21 June and was requested at the previous European Council in Barcelona. Discussions on the EU position towards ICANN, the Internet corporation for assigned names and numbers, will take place at the Council. The Commission's position will be that the government advisory committee should have a stronger role in ICANN, but it will advise against governments becoming directly involved in ICANN's decision making process. On the exploitation of public sector information, the Commission will present to the Council a proposal for a Directive, adopted by the Commission on 5 June, which aims to see a minimum harmonisation of the rules for reuse of this information within the EU. The proposal would bring more transparency, enhance fair competition, set a maximum charge for reuse of this information and regulate practicalities. In terms of the infrastructure for the implementation of the information society, the Commission will present the analysis (which was requested at the Barcelona Council) of the remaining obstacles to a 3G (third generation mobile communications) roll out. The Commission is hoping for an endorsement of this document by the Council. This may take the form of the Presidency conclusions at the forthcoming Seville summit. In addition, the Council will hear the reports from the IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) task force, which has the aim of ensuring that there is the timely availability of IPv6, which includes recommendations of avoiding fragmentation of approaches and mandatory timetables. Finally, the Council will hear the work prepared by the Commission on a new regulatory framework for radio spectrum policy in the EU. This will keep the Council informed on the latest progress on the Commission's draft recommendations, which are expected to be published in June.