At the heart of the European Union lies the Single Market—the possibility for people to buy and sell goods and services anywhere in the EU. So it is ironic that the European sector least constrained by geography—the digital market—is also the least unified. To remedy that situation, the European Commission has announced its Digital Single Market Strategy, which addresses three main areas.
The first is "Better access for consumers and businesses to digital goods and services" and includes two of the thorniest issues: geo-blocking and copyright. As the EU's strategy notes, "too many Europeans cannot use online services that are available in other EU countries, often without any justification; or they are re-routed to a local store with different prices. Such discrimination cannot exist in a Single Market."
There is strong resistance to removing geo-blocking, particularly from copyright companies that have traditionally sold rights on a national basis and which therefore want geo-blocking to enforce that fragmentation. The Pirate Party Member of the European Parliament (MEP), Julia Reda, quoted a fellow MEP justifying geo-blocking as follows: "I can’t buy Finnish bread in any German supermarket or bakery. Far too few people here would buy it, so the market doesn't offer it to me. And you don’t see me demanding that the European Commission bloody-well make that product available to me."
Spurred on by that analogy, Reda decided to explore whether Finnish bread was indeed available outside Finland. "One tweet and a few hours later I was the fortunate owner of an artisanal loaf of bread from Finland," she said. Unlike artistic works under copyright, there is no restrictive territorial bread licensing system to stop people abroad from buying products of Finnish bakers.
Reda is the author of a recent report for the European Parliament evaluating the current EU Copyright Directive, which governs copyright law in Europe. In it, she offers many concrete suggestions for updating the overall framework. That will feed in to the other main element of the Digital Single Market Strategy's first area: "Modernising copyright law to ensure the right balance between the interests of creators and those of users or consumers"—a topic even more contentious than abolishing geo-blocking.
The second broad area of the EU Digital Strategy is "shaping the environment for digital networks and services to flourish." This includes things like investing in communications infrastructure, managing wireless spectrum, and reviewing current telecoms and media rules. An important part of the digital environment will be another new directive, this time for data protection. Like copyright, this too is an area where many companies are fighting hard for European regulations that favor their interests and business models, usually at the expense of the public.
The final set of EU initiatives is grouped under the heading "Creating a European Digital Economy and Society with long-term growth potential." It consists mostly of the usual buzzwords: cloud computing, big data, interoperability—and one novelty: a transition to a "smart industrial system," or "Industry 4.0" as it is called here.
Just as nebulous as these terms is the timetable for completing work on the Digital Single Market Strategy's projects. Some will naturally be realized faster and more easily than others. Expect work on geo-blocking bans and copyright reform to get bogged down in a frenzy of lobbying whose main aim will be to ensure as little progress as possible.
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