Duncan Robinson

European Union citizens will be able to use their phones abroad for as long as they like without incurring roaming fees, after all. Brussels executed a public U-turn in a desperate attempt to rescue a policy that was once held up as a tangible example of the EU’s benefit to ordinary citizens only to become a source of consumer ire. The cause of anger was a European Commission proposal from September that would have limited to 90 days a year the period for which mobile phone users would be spared roaming charges in Europe. Amid outrage from MEPs and consumer groups, the commission on Wednesday introduced a new proposal that scrapped the unpopular 90-day limit. It also includes measures to root out potential abuse of the ban on roaming charges in an effort to placate telecoms companies, which have complained bitterly about the loss of roaming fees.

European news publishers will be given the right to levy fees on internet platforms such as Google if search engines show snippets of their stories, under radical copyright reforms being finalised by the European Commission.

The proposals, to be published in September, are aimed at diluting the power of big online operators, whose market share in areas such as search leads to unbalanced commercial negotiations between the search engine and content creators, according to officials. At the heart of the draft copyright plan, news publishers would receive “exclusive rights” to make their content available online to the public in a move that would force services such as Google News to agree terms with news organisations for showing extracts of articles. Citing dwindling revenues at news organisations, the commission warns that failure to push on with such a policy would be “prejudicial for . . . media pluralism.”

Europe’s largest wireless carriers have pledged to launch superfast 5G networks in at least one city in every European Union country by 2020, as part of a manifesto signed by the heads of BT, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia and Vodafone among others. But as a quid pro quo for more investment, controversial new EU rules on net neutrality should be watered down, according to the document signed by 17 different companies. In the document, the telecoms groups threaten to postpone investment unless regulators offer more light-touch arrangements.