On Fri, 30 Jul 1999, Mark Measday wrote:
> Odd, given your arguments, that, with the good advice Mr B received at the EC,
> we do not see him at the helm of some more adventurous venture.
Good advice? From who?
Mr Bangemann headed up DG XIII, the telecommunications directorate. He was
of course one of the 22 Commissioners forced to resign because of corruption
and mismanagement at the European Commission. He then went on to compound
the scandal by accepting a position with Telefonica at a million dollars a
year, give or take the odd hundred thousand.
> Why would a man so much more in possession of the facts than most choose merely
> to learn Spanish at such a high salary when he could have burst from his
> straitjacket and reaped the rewards of entrepreneurial endeavour according to
> your account below?
Did someone claim that a position at the European Commission implied
some sort of entrepreneurial skills? Not me. What I said was
> The Internet's amazing and continuing growth has
> shattered the complacency of telcos and governments alike. What is a
> commonplace is that by 2001 most telecoms traffic everywhere will be
> data, not voice. By 2005 voice will be a tiny fraction of the bandwidth
> in use, and all of the equipment, practices, laws, and regulations
> developed over the last century of voice telecommunications will be
> obsolete and irrelevant. No matter how hard the bureaucrats try to
> stuff this huge and growing elephant into the straitjacket that they
> developed for the mouse that they are used to, it just ain't gonna fit.
There are many bureaucrats at the Commission trying to stuff the
Internet into a straitjacket. DG XIII, Mr Bangemann's lot, has
specific responsibility for telecommunications and is largely staffed
by people with a telco background. They are the ones trying to do
the stuffing.
--
Jim Dixon Managing Director
VBCnet GB Ltd http://www.vbc.net tel +44 117 929 1316
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Member of Council Telecommunications Director
Internet Services Providers Association EuroISPA EEIG
http://www.ispa.org.uk http://www.euroispa.org
tel +44 171 976 0679 tel +32 2 503 22 65
