EU Commission: Use agricultural funds for high-speed internet in rural areas

A Commission staff working document titled "Better access for rural areas to modern ICT" (directed towards the Parliament and the Council) concludes with the following paragraph:

Rural development policy 2007–2013 shows many options for investing in ICT in agriculture, agri-food and forestry, and in the rural economy in general. MSs and regions need to efficiently target funding and capital in order to achieve the best outcomes. In order to meet the needs of the rural population in a comprehensive manner and to ensure that EU funding can have a significant impact, managing authorities of different EU programs will need to co-operate closely and complement each other activities applying a strategic approach for rural areas' development.

In the context of this document this sounds for me like agricultural funds (e.g. the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD)) are supposed to be used to connect rural areas with high-speed internet connection.

Although there might be some very basic logic in these considerations, this is the most intransparent way in promoting ICT development.

EU transparency: Structural Funds

The European Commission has started a new website in order to strengthen transparency in the spending of structural funds.

The site, which is "work in progress", will be a hub linking to all relevant national and regional authorities within EU member states responsible for the spending of structural funds. On these national/regional pages, the authorities will have to list all beneficiaries of structural funds.

So far, there is still very much work to do. In fact, only a very small majority of national websites is linked, some of them are not working and others are also work in progress, which means that they do not yet contain any information on beneficiaries.

In general, this is a good and important initiative, but it seems as if we will have to wait for quite some time until this will provide an effective tool for intra-state and inter-state comparisons.

And, what is very important from my point of view: All the national/regional websites should provide an English language version (at least!) of their respective information in order to allow citizens and authorities from other countries to see how the money is spent in other regions. If this would not be the case, than the whole initiative would be non-sense.