Brussels, 29/09/2008 (Agence Europe) - On Monday 29 September, the European Commission published a new report outlined the main steps that Europe has to take to respond to the next wave of the Information Revolution. The emergence of new trends, such as social networking, the decisive shift to on-line business services, nomadic services based on GPS and mobile TV and the growth of smart tags, means that Europe has to have a strategy to meet the new challenges and to make the transition to Web 3.0, the report says. Europe is well placed to exploit these trends because of its policies to support open and pro-competitive telecom networks as well as privacy and security, the Commission notes, as it opens a public consultation exercise on this issue. The consultation exercise wants to determine what public and private initiatives can be taken to exploit the possibilities. The Commission has also unveiled a new Broadband Performance Index (BPI) that compares national performance on key measures such as broadband speed, price, competition and coverage. This index shows that Europe is already well placed to take advantage of the possibilities opened up by broadband, because of open and competitive environment for investments. The index ranks EU countries' achievements in high speed internet according to the main factors affecting the development of faster broadband to highlight priorities for improvement. Sweden and the Netherlands top this European broadband league, which complements the more traditional broadband penetration index used so far by telecoms regulators. “The Internet of the future will radically change our society,” said Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding. “Web 3.0 means seamless 'anytime, anywhere' business, entertainment and social networking over fast reliable and secure networks. It means the end of the divide between mobile and fixed lines. It signals a tenfold quantum leap in the scale of the digital universe by 2015. Europe has the know-how and the network capacity to lead this transformation. We must make sure that Web 3.0 is made and used in Europe.” (I.L./transl.rt)