Amelia Andersdotter is the Swedish Pirate Party MEP who won her seat more than two years ago, but is only heading to the European Parliament now, due to eurocratic delays. TorrentFreak catches up with the 24-year-old, who will be the youngest MEP in the room when she finally takes her seat.
"European approaches to competition law need to be changed, at least a bit. Better sector adaptation, for instance. The lack of real control over vertical integration creates the situation where telcos (or media enterprises) own everything from the backbone cables to the music streaming service – that's not good. One would at least expect some obligation to keep the different tiers apart," Andersdotter says.
"Currently this type of bundling is, more worryingly, encouraged rather than regulated and it creates a very unfair balance between the infrastructure owners (in this case) and users. Competition law just now deals mostly with horizontal integration, which would be say, if one company owns all of the cable in northern Belgium (Telenet)."
Andersdotter points out that the telecommunications sector has some good sector specific laws already, the net neutrality law in the Netherlands being a prime example. The problem is, however, to get all member states to adopt these regulations.
Pirate To Join European Parliament As Youngest Member
(Image: Demonstration mot IPRED, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from cybriks's photostream)
