European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker yesterday ordered officials to draw up new plans for the EU’s landmark free mobile phone roaming policy after it ran into fierce criticism.
The commission announced the original “free roaming” plans with huge fanfare early last year, but when it unveiled the details this week, consumer groups were outraged by a limit to just 90 days of free roaming per year.
“In light of the initial feedback received, president Juncker has instructed the services to withdraw that text and to work on a new proposal,” a commission statement said.
“As we have promised, roaming charges will disappear. Nothing changes there,” it said, downplaying the importance of the apparent U-turn on one of the commission’s most high-profile priorities.
“The draft in question was about the modalities, and it was only a draft by the services,” it said.
Consumer groups had assumed the commission’s pledge to end mobile roaming charges — charges when people use their phone outside their home country — meant exactly that, without conditions or caveats.
As a result, they responded angrily to the 90-day “fair use” limit, charging that Brussels had caved in to the powerful telecom companies for whom roaming charges have long been a lucrative source of extra income.
Commission spokesman Alexander Winterstein yesterday said that the decision was perfectly routine, that Juncker had not been fully aware of all the details and when he had seen them and the reaction, had asked officials to try again.
The overall roaming plan was a “major success” and the review concerned the “modalities” only, not the objective, he said.
“It was simply not good enough for our president [Juncker], therefore he instructed us to work harder, try harder and come back with something better,” Winterstein told a news briefing.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day