Galileo Navigation System Gets Go-Ahead From EU Parliament

An anonymous reader writes "Plans to start up the EU's first global satellite navigation system (GNSS) built under civilian control, entirely independent of other navigation systems and yet interoperable with them, were approved by MEPs on Wednesday. Both parts of this global system — Galileo and EGNOS — will offer citizens a European alternative to America's GPS or Russia's Glonass signals. The Galileo system could be used in areas such as road safety, fee collection, traffic and parking management, fleet management, emergency call, goods tracking and tracing, online booking, safety of shipping, digital tachographs, animal transport, agricultural planning and environmental protection to drive growth and make citizens' lives easier."

Comments

What it will be used for...

[the grace of R'hllor]

Road tax per kilometer driven. By having a tracking device in every car. This has already been discussed in Dutch parliament, and so far has been rejected, but it probably won't be forever; I know people who are actually in favor of such draconian surveillance.

Of course, a decade after that it will be used to collect speeding fines on all roads. Which makes sense from a government point of view, but would be a practical nightmare.

Re:What it will be used for...

[bluefoxlucid]

In the US, whenever this comes up, people ask why not just check the odometer and charge a tax at vehicle re-registration.

Re:What it will be used for...

[ledow]

This is a stupidly expensive way to do road tax.

If you want to do that, electronic booths are much simpler - Italy has them already. Any motorway, you take a ticket when you get on, pay when you get off. You don't need multi-billion pound satellite systems to do it.

And Galileo doesn't "send" signals from the car to the satellites. The car "receives" the current position from the satellites. So there's absolutely NOTHING in this that couldn't be done without Galileo (hell, we have GPS for a start!). And, to be honest, the easiest tax is just to tax petrol and diesel more.

Tracking devices in the car make NO difference here. If you want to tax, you do not need them, and they are actually easily tampered with / jammed and more costly than just deploying an ANPR or toll system anyway.

Speeding fines on all roads? Fuck, to me that's reason enough to let them do it. STOP FUCKING BREAKING THE LAW. If you want to speed, campaign for higher speed limits (a proposal TOTALLY IGNORED by the electorate last time it was brought up in the UK political system), not disregarding the laws we have.

Re:What it will be used for...

[LavouraArcaica]

I really can't see how GPS (or galileo) (or odometer checking) could be more usefull than taxing the gas/diesel, since both systems could be cheated, but you cannot drive without gas.

And there is another point of taxing gas (versus km driven): it estimulates people to buy more economic mileage cars.

So, why change a system that (a) works and (b) it's fair to a system that can be cheated and it's not so fair?

Re:What it will be used for...

[YrWrstNtmr]

The car could refuse to work if it doesn't receive a GPS signal that makes sense.

Like when you go into a tunnel.

Re:What it will be used for...

[hydrofix]

While I don't agree that camera surveillance or a ticket booth system on motorways in a solution for all parts of Europe, I think the military and economic applications of EU's own GPS system are probably more important than the surveillance applications. While a direct military confrontation with the USA and EU is exceedingly unlikely now, or at any point in the future (thanks to NATO), there could be future proxy wars where EU and US opinions differ, and where the US might conceivably use jamming of the GPS signals to e.g. to render EU wardrones inoperable. Such situation might arise in the Middle East for example, where Europeans seem more open to the Arab/Palestinian causes than the Americans, who are very staunchly allied with Israel. Or any other military situation involving proxies – bottom line is, it's not a bad idea to develop new military technology that's not dependent on tech by others, especially as wardrones are looking more and more like the future of warfare, and sooner or later EU must start producing its own wardrones.

Further down the road, trade disputes between the US and EU are much more common and likely than any forms of military engagement. Should a trade dispute escalate, it's conceivable though unlikely, that there might develop a situation where the Americans would leverage their control over GPS as a weapon in trade negotiations, especially if the tech under dispute is dependent on positioning tech – like is true for more and more of new high tech. Look at what happened to Samsung in Apple v. Samsung – essentially a modern form of protectionism through a flawed trial by court. Hopefully not a sign of things to come.

For EU, it's not a bad to have its own positioning system just in case for situations like those. While it seems currently very unlikely that the US would abuse its control over GPS in any situation, no one knows what future could hold. As deploying a GPS system is a process that takes years or decades to complete, if a need arises at some point, it's probably too late by then. Especially the wardrone tech seems like something that the EU might want its own GPS system for already now (think exporting this tech to countries not allied with US). And on the good side, I can imagine many worse uses for EU tax dollars than developing space technology!

Re:To what end?

[fredrik70]

Maybe we do not want to be dependent on something so important that is not under our control?

Re:To what end?

[peppepz]

Just so the Americans can jam Galileo whenever they want with no impact on their own system.

And the converse is true. Seems fair to me.