 after them and to change the existing practices. So with respect to the existing rules, a tender notice has to be published in the official journal of the European Union and it has to comply with these rules. It has to make reference to standards that are developed in the formal standard setting organizations or common technical specifications and those have to be officially published in the official journal again. And they must, the tender notice must describe the relevant functional or performance requirements that the government has. So the things the government has to do basically are to treat the contracting authorities, the government purchasing entities, they must treat vendors equally, non-discriminatorily, they have to act transparently, they must not, and this is of course a very critical one. They must not draw up the technical specifications in a way that excludes products that meet their requirements and they must, and this is another critical one which is quite often disregarded, that tenders must not accept in exceptional circumstances, which I shall come back to, make any reference to a particular make, to a particular source, process, trademark or the like. Today as I said in exceptional circumstances, is it permissible for any tender to name specific products or systems? There is a very limited exception where there's a need for the government entity to have technical compatibility with existing systems. That's something which one of course has to be very careful with because it can be an excuse for inertia, it can be an excuse for just continuing with the way things are and not looking for ways by which to achieve more openness in the sense that I described earlier with citizens being able to interact with their governments via a variety of platforms with a variety of interoperable products and systems and cost. It enables some purchasing entities to disregard the possibility that they might be able to use different solutions that might not be compatible technically with existing solutions that might save governments a lot of money as Commissioner Cruz mentioned this morning. There is an exception where you have a genuinely innovative product to be procured and there's no standard that applies to it and there's a general one which all of these have to be very narrowly applied, the law requires that they be narrowly applied, the standard is technically inadequate for the purposes that the government has in that particular procurement. So when can a standard be technically inadequate for its purpose? It could be where it doesn't provide the appropriate means of achieving