Candace Johnson is president of Europe Online SA, a satellite broadband Internet service provider based in Luxembourg. A serial entrepreneur, Johnson moved to Europe from the United States 20 years ago. Having written her first business plan as a child (for a lemonade stand), she went on to become co-founder of the Astra satellite system and founder of Loral CyberStar-Teleport Europe, the first independent European satellite network. She also is a founding shareholder in London-based Ariadne Capital and a director of early stage investor Sophia Euro Lab, based in Sophia Antipolis, France. She was interviewed by Tim Phillips for the International Herald Tribune.

What are conditions like for an entrepreneur in Europe in 2002?

It has always been difficult, and it still is. The tax systems and the corporate structure have been that way for a long time. In France, until five years ago, all the laws discouraged enterprise. Until recently in Germany, people would consider you crazy if you even wanted to start a business. In 1999, 98 percent of the money being invested by Europeans in start-ups was invested in U.S. companies. We have bred a tough bunch of entrepreneurs as a result. Those that are still with us, we can be proud of.

You have dedicated a large part of your working life to the deregulation of telecommunications and the introduction of competition in Europe. Have you won that fight?

No. But a big step has taken place. I was founding president of the Association of Private Telecom Operators [VATM] in Germany, and my happiest day in the struggle to deregulate was recently when I was talking to a taxi driver in Berlin. I told him I was in telecoms and he said, "Poor you, it's too competitive in Germany, everyone has so many choices."

For a long time in Europe, "fair competition" were dirty words. I recall going to see IBM Germany on behalf of VATM in 1992 and being told that IBM wanted to be a good local citizen - and so was going to buy from Deutsche Telekom. Now there are definitely pockets of fair competition in Europe. But look at new technologies like ADSL: In the Netherlands, practically all the new ADSL carriers have gone. In France, in the U.K., it is the same. Incumbents still have a strong position when it comes to exploiting new technologies. We need to sweep away any restrictions that make that possible.

Why?

Better service. We live in a capitalist society and new companies will not be able to offer a better service in the long term unless they can cover their costs and create competition. If we do not create a level playing field, new companies will not survive. Governments that impose quotas or restrictive laws, or charge license fees, serve no one.

But aren't third-generation mobile phone licenses, for example, just another way to create competition?

The saddest thing is that this has created the opposite of a free market. There is not one new player in the whole of European 3G. Instead, the incumbents are paying to protect the market share they built up. I was one of the few to speak out about the fiasco of 3G licenses, because to ask a company to pay for a license and then make it pay to build the infrastructure to use the license - there isn't a business plan in the world that could support that.

You have consistently backed deregulated cross-border communications as a way to create new markets in Europe. Has it had any effect?

Satellite television is definitely one area where it has. It's deregulation-squared, because it took a private operator, Astra, and private broadcasters, like Rupert Murdoch, Leo Kirch and Silvio Berlusconi, and put them together. Don't forget we were pirates at that time, going against the mainstream. When we first put up the satellite, state broadcasters said they didn't want to be on it, but others who were kept out of their local markets said "yes," and look how that has changed the profile of broadcasting in Europe.

You often call for entrepreneurs to make changing the world their priority. Isn't it more realistic to accept that they want to make money?

For me, being an entrepreneur has never been a way to enrich myself. That wasn't the goal of entrepreneurship. You have to create something that generates money, because if you don't, it won't last - but the ultimate idea is to make the world a better place. When the get-rich-quick idea of entrepreneurship in the 1990s started in the U.S. and reached Europe, I was aghast. There has been a shift of wealth as a result, and we have to inspire the people who have that wealth to reinvest it in society. If we do not, we will have a lost generation, and not a next generation. We cannot continue to act as we have done for the last five years.

How do you make that point to entrepreneurs you support?

We have to take personal responsibility. We have to ask if our ideas are going to harm anyone - that's very important - and then if they are going to help anyone, and then if we can make some of the people we help pay for them. If we follow these principles, I believe eventually we can find a way that entrepreneurship will make disease or famine obsolete.

Does Europe create entrepreneurs equal to those in the United States?