Too often we do not treat European affairs as domestic affairs, which is what they are. The countries of the European Union we have, as we verified in the 2020 pandemic, a serious problem of strategic autonomy from the point of view of industry and services. The innovation is in the United States and the factories in China while the energy is in Russia. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has changed everything. The United States has launched an ambitious green reindustrialization planmuch more agile than the one proposed by the EU. China does not want to be just the assembly factory Instead, it aims to take over chip manufacturing in Taiwan and have its own 5G standard. And post-Putin Russia will sell its power to whoever needs it because it hasn’t transitioned and pays better.
In this context, Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton will shortly launch a public consultation on the model of telecommunications services in Europe. We play a lot. First as citizens and consumers to have the digital services of the future at fair prices that we can now consider essential in terms of connectivity. It cannot be that those who assume the risk of the investment cannot recover it or execute it more slowly than their North American or Chinese competitors. because they cannot pass on the costs to the large users that are the platforms (mostly Americans) and have to endorse them to consumers with lower margins, as the president of the GSMA, José María Álvarez Pallete, has been explaining for years. And neither can it happen that the limits on business concentration in Europe disarm us in the face of the United States because companies based in our continent, such as Deutsche Telekom or Telefónica, stop being competitive in research and investment in favor of their Chinese or North American competitors due to its smaller size by virtue of the regulation. We are playing a lot so that we do not pay attention to Breton’s query when he launches it.