Tech firms call for US, EU cooperation on regulations

WASHINGTON - Conflicting regulations authored by the European Union and the U.S. government are increasing the cost of IT products and threatening U.S. and European leadership in the tech industry, a group of technology executives told a U.S. Congress subcommittee Wednesday.

Executives from five tech-related companies and a large IT trade group urged Congress to champion the U.S. government's traditional hands-off approach to technology regulation during trade negotiations and other discussions, including a presidential summit between U.S. President George Bush and E.U. leaders June 20.

While the U.S. and E.U. continue to struggle with disagreements on tech issues such as who should control the Internet and disability standards for software, countries such as China and India threaten the traditional tech industry dominance of the U.S., Europe and Japan, said Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, a trade group based in Arlington, Virginia.

"The E.U. and U.S. must stop arguing about how to build a better sand castle and focus on the economic tsunami headed our way from China, India, Brazil and Eastern Europe," Miller said during a hearing of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Subcommittee on European Affairs. "While these issues are important, we dwell on them at a price."

While most witnesses at the hearing urged senators to push the E.U. to mirror the U.S. approach toward less technology regulation, Miller also advocated a U.S. government program to encourage more U.S. students to pursue college degrees in math, science and technology. Noting that China already produces more than double the number of engineers per capita than the U.S. does, Miller called for a government program that would pay for the college educations of math, science and technology students.

After the Soviet Union launched the space satellite Sputnik in 1957, Congress responded with the National Defense Education Act, which increased funding for university research and helped pay for math and science education, Miller noted. "We should do it again," he added. "We need to get that radical."

Last month, Representative Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican, introduced the Math and Science Incentive Act of 2005, which would pay off the interest on college loans for qualified math and science students. But Miller said the U.S. needs to go beyond Wolf's proposal and pay for the complete education of math and science students, at a potential cost of a few billion dollars a year.

"It's not chicken feed," Miller said of the cost. "But think about the return on investment."

Beyond Miller's call for a new government program, other witnesses generally focused on how the U.S. can urge the E.U. to reduce tech-related regulations. Executives with Philips Electronics North America Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. decried a common practice in European nations of levying copyright taxes on devices that can be used to make copies of music, movies or written products, saying the levies drive up vendor and customer costs. The copyright levies are meant to allow creators of copyrighted works to get paid.