Devious, meddling Eurocrats abolish roaming charges

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Grr! Look at the dastardly European Union! Not only have they managed to maintain peace and security in Europe for 60 years and provided an excellent mechanism for expanding liberal democracy across the former Eastern Bloc, but now they’ve gone and done something really awesome for phone users across Europe: Abolished roaming charges.

It’s almost as if they want Nigel Farage to look like a dick.

Yesterday the European Parliament voted to end roaming charges across Europe – for both calls and mobile internet, meaning that finally we’ll be able to go on holiday without receiving that depressing text message from our scrooge-like UK networks telling us that it costs £6 per megabyte of data to check our emails.

Here’s EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes talking about it:

That’s not all – the same legislation, known as the “Connected Continent” telecoms regulation also looks set to enshrine net neutrality into European law. This means that we won’t get into a situation like there is in America, where internet service providers throttle access to the likes of Netflix unless they pay them a big wad of cash. The fear is that this sort of throttling would not only make watching House of Cards a more buffered experience, but also that it would threaten free speech – creating a “two tier” internet, where the corporations get better access than the little guy.

By comparison, in Nigel Farage’s alternative reality, his isolated British government are looking on as the rest of Europe can communicate with each other with no outlandish surcharges, whilst anyone from Britain planning to go and do business in Europe, is not only hit with an uncertain trade environment over tariffs and quotas, but also has to pay through the nose to talk to anyone there.

Typical meddling EU! Looking out for the consumer!

James O’Malley
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