European Commission Vice-President Andrus Ansip is still fuming about member states’ watering-down of proposals that would have abolished mobile roaming surcharges within the EU – and he wants the public to back him up on this.

Speaking at “European Divides,” the Thursday launch event for POLITICO in Europe,  the digital single market coordinator reiterated his outrage at the Council of the EU’s position on that element of the Connected Continent package, in which they propose letting telcos charge for anything more than a handful of calls, texts and data megabytes per month.

“This is a negotiation process between the three parties – the member states, the European Parliament and the European Commission, and I don’t think it’s correct or somehow supportive to set some kind of red lines, but I’m counting on you and on public opinion,” he said. “People are expecting the full abolition of roaming surcharges.”

Ansip used the example of his children, who will be travelling to Greece and Poland on upcoming holidays and school trips.

“Of course she’s the daughter of a quite well-paid vice-president of the European Commission, but what do other people have to say to their children? ‘Don’t pick up my phonecall when travelling in other countries? Don’t use your Facebook account – maybe there will be some videos; it will kill our budget.’”

He also pointed out that every political party in the last European elections promised to abolish roaming surcharges, yet countries are now trying to pull back on the idea. “All the people, including politicians, have to keep their promises,” he said.

The abolition of roaming surcharges – the extra fees people pay to use their phone in a different European country than their own – has been on the Commission’s agenda for almost a decade now.

Former commissioners Viviane Reding and Neelie Kroes successfully drove them down, but Kroes’s proposal to scrap them completely has hit the buffers in Council, largely due to the fact that several member states, such as Spain and France, have large mobile operators with a lot of political clout.

The Council’s proposal would provide a very small allowance of premium-free cross-border mobile usage, with a vague plan to revisit the issue of abolition in a few years’ time.

The issue is important not only because of tourists, business travelers and those who live near national borders, but also because of the rise of new technologies such as connected cars that will rely on having a live signal at all times.