The European Commission is due to release guidelines on how network operators should set wholesale access prices to copper line infrastructure to allow them to accommodate a costly roll-out of newer networks made of fibre-optic cables.

EU regulators have recently given their blessing to a spate of price rises for copper access, most notably CMT in Spain and AGCOM in Italy, in spite of firmly-worded advice from the European Commission not to do so (see 'Background').

Senior officials and politicians representing the Hungarian EU Presidency, the European Parliament, the German Finance Ministry and the European Commission seemed ready to set a deadline for the SEPA switchover at a panel debate organised by Deutsche Bank yesterday (12 April).

The panellists agreed that the current system of voluntary switchovers from existing transfer systems to SEPA (see 'Background') would not be sufficient and that a binding deadline was needed.

In spite of ambitious targets being set by the EU to speed up the bloc's take up of wireless broadband, many countries will struggle to meet a deadline to free up new spectrum to carry the services.

Industry sources reveal that countries bordering Russia, such as Poland and the Baltic states, have cast doubt on the EU's 2013 deadline for freeing up the 800 MHZ band previously used by terrestrial television because they fear technical interference from Russia's military services.

The UK yesterday won an expected victory at a meeting of Justice and Home Affairs ministers when seventeen countries said they would like to include intra-EU flights in a draft directive on passenger name records.

EurActiv previously reported that Germany was a major opponent to this measure and sources reveal this is still the case. They are joined by Austria, Slovenia and Luxembourg.

EURid announced the news yesterday during a celebration of the fifth birthday of the '.eu' domain's opening to the public.

In its first month of operation from 7 April 2006, over 1.7 million .eu names were registered. It has therefore taken five years to double the number to 3.4 million.

This puts the number of registered '.eu' names behind '.de' (over 14 million) and '.nl' (almost 4.4 million) but ahead of '.fr' (just short of two million).

Since May 2009 the European Commission has been talking to civil society groups, industry, privacy and data protection watchdogs and the European Network Information Security Agency to come up with ways to address security concerns around Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) or smart tags.

Since their invention, the tags have become a pervasive part of daily life and can be found in contactless travel passes, hospital patients' wrist bands and in more unusual places like implants in the hands of VIP guests to night clubs.

It is the first time Microsoft - itself the target of anticompetition action in the United States and Europe - has filed a complaint with regulators over competition issues.

In its complaint on Thursday (31 March), Microsoft claims Google engages in a "pattern of actions" that unfairly impede competition.

Google controls more than 90% of the Internet search advertising market in Europe, well ahead of Microsoft's Bing, which is struggling to make inroads into Google's market share.

Negotiations on an EU proposal on passenger name records (PNR) recently took on a different shape, as member states are being won over by British arguments that collecting data on air travel to destinations outside the bloc alone would leave a considerable security gap.

According to an EU paper seen by EurActiv, the UK proposal has struck a chord with many member states, because countries fear they could miss out on a substantial amount of data on suspected terrorists, who are changing the way they travel.