Europe - Major operators have called for less regulation and to be allowed to charge websites for carriage of their traffic

[reuters] The bosses Europe's big telecoms companies on Wednesday urged regulators to adopt a lighter touch on big industry mergers and allow telecom firms to charge major websites like Google to prioritise their traffic on networks.

These and other recommendations were put forward by a group of telecom industry executives at a conference in Brussels held by the European Commission to look at why investment in high speed broadband was lagging across much of the continent.

Nellie Kroes, the European Commissioner for the digital agenda, called the meeting because of growing concerns among governments that telecom operators were not building out fiber optic networks quickly enough, putting the region's long-term economic competitiveness at risk.

Telecom CEOs urge less regulation to spur broadband