European Union News - Information Society

The European Commission launched a public consultation with a view to updating the current list of relevant wholesale and retail telecoms markets subject to the Commission's "Article 7" procedure under EU telecoms rules. In particular, the purpose of the questionnaire is to identify major relevant trends and to consult stakeholders on the revision of the current list of relevant markets and their scope, as well as on markets to be possibly added to the list, including markets regulated at national level and trans-national markets.

MEPs at the Internal Market Committee in the European Parliament approved a non-binding resolution that analyses and sets out proposals to remove obstacles to greater use of the digital single market. The resolution recommends to introduce a "European Trustmark" certifying that an online shop fully complies with EU law.

The Council today adopted a directive establishing a legal framework aimed at improving access to and digitisation of orphan works across the EU. The Italian delegation, however, voted against. The new rules will facilitate the digitisation of and lawful cross-border online access to orphan works contained in the collections of libraries, educational establishments, museums, archives, audiovisual heritage institutions and public service broadcasting organisations.

Cyber Europe 2012 is an exercise which brings together hundreds of cyber security experts from across the EU in order to test their readiness to combat cyber-attacks in a day-long simulation across Europe. The exercise is testing how they would respond and co-operate in the event of sustained attacks against the public websites and computer systems of major European banks.

The Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) has revised its broadband common positions, originally adopted in 2006 and 2007, to reflect both technological developments and regulatory developments. It is therefore consulting interested parties on this topic until 18 of October 2012. In addition it launched a consultation on its 2013 work programme until 26 October.

The new strategy presented by the European Commission to drive European business and government productivity via cloud computing, is based in "unleashing the potential of cloud computing in Europe". The actions foreseen seek to deliver a net gain of 2.5 million new European jobs, and an annual boost of €160 billion to EU GDP by 2020.

An EU-funded research project, the Eurocloud project, looks set to drastically cut the electricity and the installation costs of servers in cloud computing data centres. It has adapted low-power microprocessor technologies, typically used in mobile phones, to work on a much larger scale. Preliminary measurements show that using these technologies reduces power needs by 90%, compared to conventional servers.

For Galileo, the European GPS system, public awareness is 57% in average, while in 2007 it was 40%. For the Global monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) programme the awareness is 38% whereas it was only 22% in 2009, says a recent published Eurobarometer. Also, most Europeans are very positive about space activities in general.