The European Commission on the 5 of february has warned the Lithuanian national telecoms regulator, Ryšių reguliavimo tarnyba (RRT), that obliging terrestrial broadcasters to use specific suppliers to transmit their programmes constitutes a barrier to competition and prevents new terrestrial transmission service providers from entering the market.

Yesterday marked the start of a new era for telecoms in the EU. The telecoms regulators of the 27 EU countries will meet for the first time in Brussels as members of the new Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC).

New EU telecoms rules will officially become EU law on December 19, 2009 following their publication in December's 18, 2009 Official Journal of the European Union. The new rules composed of the Better Regulation Directive and the Citizens’ Rights Directive will need to be transposed into national laws of the 27 EU Member States by June 2011.

At the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Sharm El Sheikh (Egypt), the European Commission on the 16 of November has welcomed a landmark step towards a truly global (and local) internet: the announcement that "Internationalised Domain Names" will be introduced at the top level. Until now, internet domain names were either fully or partly in the Latin "a to z" alphabet.

The 4th annual meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, on 15-18 November 2009, which will be hosted by the Government of Egypt, will gather entities accredited to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) as well institutions from 180 countries engaged in Internet governance matters.