22 April: Telecoms Council

Date: 29/04/1999

TELECOMS ministers reached political agreement on a draft directive on 'digital signatures' at their meeting in Luxembourg. The deal, which will be formally approved at a future Council meeting, means the signatures used to clinch online deals or to verify documents will be made legally equivalent to hand-written ones. It also establishes an EU-wide legal framework for the recognition of certification services which certify that a signature is genuine. The final text follows a technology 'neutral approach' which lays down only very limited technical requirements for secure signatures, the certification services and the certificates themselves.

MINISTERS held a brief discussion on the action member states have taken to ward off potential catastrophe to computer systems wrought by the 'millennium bug'. The Dutch delegation said a new forum might be set up to stimulate and coordinate more concrete measures to offset the damage the bug could cause. The German presidency said the issue would also be on the agenda at the EU summit in Cologne in June.

THE European Commission's report on the results of its consultation exercise on the convergence of the telecoms, media and information technology sectors was also discussed. Ministers endorsed the basic conclusions of the exercise - that technology should be regulated under the same basic 'horizontal' framework separately from content.

ACTING Telecoms Comm- issioner Martin Bangemann informed the Council of the latest developments in the 'Global Business Dialogue' initiative on electronic commerce. He said the industry-led GBD, which was set up on his initiative, had met in New York in January and was now working on position papers on a number of e-commerce issues including taxation and data protection.