Jean-Jacques Sahel leads Skype's Government Relations team in the EU.

Yesterday I travelled to Brussels to take part in a TV panel discussion on the revision of the EU’s telecoms legislation (which should be finalised by early May in Brussels) with two Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), David Hammerstein and Alexander Alvaro. We talked about the whole of the Electronic Communications Framework, and touched on one of our key concerns – the arbitrary blocking and degradation of applications like Skype. You’ll shortly able to watch a video of the debate online.

Then from Brussels, it will be off to Prague today where the current Czech Presidency of the European Union is holding its ‘High-Level Seminar on e-Communications’ on the theme of "Future Europe: Modern Communications for Everyone". I am lucky enough to take part in a panel looking at how the adaptation of the EU directives into national laws in each EU member state could improve the daily lives of Europeans. On the same panel will be a leading MEP, a UK government representative, Google and others including AT&T. No doubt this will be fun.

This comes at a very opportune time, as the German Federation of consumers has just issued the following statement supporting Skype and other innovators against arbitrary blocking by operators:

The Federation of German Consumer Organisations (Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband) regards the contractual exclusion of VoIP services such as "Skype" by T-Mobile or other operators and access providers as violation of the principles of network neutrality. It is quite obvious that such exclusions aim to protect own services on own networks against unwelcome, that is to say cheaper, competitive offerings.

It is unacceptable for the Federation of German Consumer Organisations (Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband), that particularly those mobile telecom providers, which are likely to benefit from vacant radio frequencies (‘Digital Dividend’) for wireless broadband supply, at the same time block the access of consumers to attractive services over their wireless infrastructures.

The EU and the national legislation are therefore called on to commit the operators and the access providers to generally ensure network neutrality by appropriate guidelines in the relevant European directives as well as in the German Telecommunications Act. In addition, both the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur) and the federal states in Germany should impose obligations for the recipients in the course of the intended allocation of capacities of the "Digital Dividend", in order to preclude a blockade of certain services.

This mirrors previous statements by the European Consumers’ Association BEUC and France’s Que Choisir / UFC. Governments and Parliamentarians will now have to respond to this very clear call by consumer representatives to take action against bad behaviour and insert the relevant protections in the new EU legislation on telecoms.

There are also rumours in the press that, following Deutsche Telekom’s April’s Fool announcement that they would block Skype even on Wifi, the European Commission would be preparing ‘binding guidelines’ to prevent operators blocking VoIP. I am looking forward to hearing more about that in Prague – and hope it may be true, and only a prelude to clearer legislation ensuring that users can access and do what they want on the Internet.

If you want a good dose of Telecoms and IT policy and regulatory thinking, you can view a live video stream of this EU High-Level event, provided with the support of Skype. Enjoy