Digital Commissioner Getting Down to Brass Tacks BERLIN - For most of her tenure as European commissioner for digital policies, Neelie Kroes has been a stark contrast to her predecessor, the former journalist Vivian Reding, who delivered the European Union's retail price caps on mobile roaming fees. Ms. Reding, a Luxembourg native, was never averse to using all the levers at her disposal when appeals for compromise - whether on price caps or lawsuits against E.U. countries - went unheeded. Ms. Kroes, a Dutch economist, sought a more cooperative relationship with Europe's telecommunications industry. After taking over as commissioner for the digital agenda in 2010, she formed a panel of the chief executives of Europe's largest operators - France Télécom, Telefónica, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia and Vodafone - who have advised her on issues like investment returns on networks and barriers to cross-border mergers. But during the past week, with European Parliament elections less than a year away and time winding down to make big changes to the telecommunications sector during this legislative period, Ms. Kroes showed that there were limits to her inclination for compromise. In a bluntly worded speech Thursday to a key committee in Parliament, she surprised lawmakers by urging them to ban mobile roaming fees outright before elections next May. The fees are a scourge for border-crossing Europeans and make up about 5 percent of a typical operator's annual revenue. Ms. Kroes's proposal was cheered by lawmakers, well aware that the roaming caps first enacted in 2007 remain one of the most popular recent achievements of the European Parliament, whose members often tend to labor in the shadows of more prominent peers in national legislatures. Malcolm Harbour, the chairman of the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee, a group considered the gatekeeper to any meaningful overhaul of the telecommunications industry, said Ms. Kroes had made a shrewd bid for parliamentary support. "She was basically saying that if we pass a ban on roaming fees, we can use this in re-election campaigns," Mr. Harbour, a former automotive engineer from the West Midlands in England, said in an interview. Deutsche Telekom, the German operator, criticized her proposal as costly at a time when the same commission was urging operators to bolster Europe's broadband infrastructure to catch up with those of the United States, South Korea and Japan. Vodafone saw in the plan a frustrating change of course, noting that last year Ms. Kroes helped extend roaming fees through 2017 and ordered operators to sell roaming services separately by July 2014. Ms. Kroes, a wily political veteran, no doubt knew her plan would provoke the ire of her erstwhile business allies. But it may bring a recalcitrant industry to the bargaining table, with a new willingness to give up a significant source of income in return for investment incentives that could give Europe a fast, cutting-edge broadband grid. Time is not an ally. But Ms. Kroes's predecessor, Ms. Reding, needed only seven months in 2006 and 2007 to shepherd through the first roaming price caps against fierce industry opposition. The price controls have limited but not eliminated Europe's cross-border premium on mobile data. Today, a German consumer can view a 1-gigabyte film on Apple TV - delivered over a landline connection - for as little as €4, or $5.20. But downloading the same amount of data from a mobile carrier could cost as much as €800 while roaming within the 27-nation bloc, or as much as €13,700 from some countries outside the European Union, according to Paul Rübig, a member of the European Parliament from Wels, Austria, who sponsored the 2007 legislation on roaming. "I support Ms. Kroes's goal, but I want to see the details," Mr. Rübig said during the past week in an interview. She aims to introduce a detailed proposal before a summit meeting set for October on Europe's digital future, leaving only seven months to push it through, in a last-minute legislative roll of the dice. "That's not much time, but we did it once before," Mr. Rübig said.