Erika Mann

While having only read this summary of the EPC report on a Digital Single Market, it appears to me that there is a lack of consideration for the existence of several very different “digital” markets.

The challenges in each of these are very different and it seems foolish to pretend that they could be solved by just focusing on those aspects that are common between them, such as digital signatures etc. In most cases those are not what has held back the development of the market.

Examples:

Film, TV and Music Industries:
Here the big challenge has been the disparity of license agreements between different national distributors and licensing agencies. This is why Spotify is still not available in Germany, and the set of music available on the service is different in different countries. And Spotify is the shining beacon of a company that has worked incredibly hard at negotiating agreements (I suspect on some level they feel they are gaining a competitive advantage since any competitor would have to go through the same negotiation process). The situation in film and tv is much worse with very few reasonable legally licensed service operating cross-nationally that I know of (there is iTunes, but it is not competitive in price with non-online services), with the obvious result that the market demand is fulfilled by non-licensed services.

Other content services
Blogs, newspapers, photo sharing services, social networking services, all operate globally with no apparent difficulty that could be helped by the European Commission. Where the content can be licensed it can be distributed. There are many challenges in creating viable business models, with advertising dominating currently.

Mobile Phones, Internet Access, Mobile Data
There are a few operators attempting to set up pan-European mobile networks on an MVNO basis. One example is Truphone Local Anywhere which I tried on my last trip to Germany. They are operating as an MVNO in Liechtenstein. However my experience was that at least one German phone was not able to call me suggesting that German operators are refusing to route calls to the unwelcome competition, in the same way as they did with the VOIP operators in Germany. The situation with data services is worse still, with none of the pan-European MVNOs able to charge acceptable rates for data transmission (£3/MB in the case of Truphone). I’d be surprised if the commission had the political will to create conditions conducive to the establishment of viable pan-European MVNO for mobile phone services.

Pure web services on the other hand have been operating with little trouble in a pan-European and in fact pan-global fashion for years, so I am unconvinced of the barriers to a unified market here. There is no problem taking credit card payments in a pan-European fashion and most digital services have little problem with contracts as they can simply stop delivering the service if payments stop. Successful examples would be web hosting and server rental (German companies operate very successfully in the global market here), VPN services, online storage, photo printing (many successful pan-European services here, such as CeWe operating out of Germany, foto.com out of Belgium, Pixmania out of France, Snapfish established in the US but with European subsidiaries), printing services (OvernightPrints operating out of Germany, VistaPrint operating globally out of the Netherlands).

Contractors:
Many writers, translators, photographers etc already accept jobs on the pan-European and global market. I don’t see a lot of evidence that they are struggling because of lack of harmonisation of the European market though no doubt in some cases easier enforcement of contracts could be a benefit, though there is a significant risk of unintended consequences of such legislation.

Some of it is draft… The reasons consumers aren’t buying cars, washing machines and loans on a pan-European market are delivery, servicing and installation for the first two and specific to the Industry for loans.

Consumer protection issues exist (an important one would be ensuring that if a contract is entered online, it can also be ended online, ending the practice of some companies making it difficult to do so).

A big issue is the difficulty many companies in Europe, especially in Germany, still have with accepting credit card transactions. I presume partially this is because the banks still make it very hard for small, newly established companies to obtain credit card merchant accounts. This is however being addressed by credit card processing services and services like Paypal, though there are some challenges with the unregulated nature of some of these services. The fact that the burden of credit card fraud is often placed on the business is also an issue for small companies.
It would certainly be possible to improve conditions here but a legislative approach is probably the wrong vehicle. One could imagine some form of loans guarantee scheme underwriting the issuing of merchant accounts to small traders, however services such as Paypal would still play a role as they offer some protection from credit card fraud compared to using a credit card directly on the website of a small merchant.

Trust issues are also addressed by the market, with reputation services, such as is part of ebay and Google shopping and many others, playing a significant role.