European Commission Proposes "Digital Single Market" and End To Geoblocking

An anonymous reader writes A new initiative from the European Commission proposes a reformed "single digital market", addressing a number of issues that it sees as obstructions to EU growth, including geoblocking — where services such as BBC's iPlayer are only available to IP addresses within the host country — and the high cost of parcel delivery and administration of disparate VAT rates across the member states. The ramifications of many of the proposals within the Digital Single Market project extend to non-EU corporations which have built their business model on the current isolationism of member state markets.

Comments

Never going to happen

[Karmashock]

So many european special interests are invested in protectionist strategies that they're not going to let it go away. They are just going to do the same thing by different names.

And if they actually did do it, they'd open europe up to competition not just internationally but even within europe. There are a lot of countries in europe that are not able to export their gods to other countries in europe for basically no reason. And that has been getting worse with the EU... not better.

Re:Never going to happen

[thegarbz]

That's the thing about harmonisation of disperse markets, for every simple example of a drawback someone will come up with an example of an improvement. Regulations typically don't just magically appear, but are rather a reaction (often a knee jerk reaction) to a specific problem. Your example is good because it highlights some serious issues at both sides. For instance the increased overhead now placed on farmers, but at the same time the increased assurance placed on the customers and the government that everything is done as it should be. I.e. you know the bottle was cleaned properly before you used it, the government knows the measured quantity of goods changing hands for taxation purposes. The poor may be hard done, but they are also the ones reasonably protected.

Now this may or may not be the case here, but in a general sense this is where these ideas often come from.

Re:Never going to happen

[Skidborg]

Or major producers are using lobbying for regulation as an opportunity to shut down smaller businesses, like they do in every industry all over the world.

Re:Never going to happen

[rioki]

In this specific case, I would rather think that the northern countries, especially Germany, wanted that their food safety regulations to also apply to the southern countries. "Somebody think of our poor consumers?" (They don't make olive oil in mid and northern Europe.)

Ed to geoblocking

[xenobyte]

...or geodiscrimination as I've always called it must be global and it should have happened 20 years ago.

It is one of the leading causes of piracy (unavailability of products locally) and a serious anachronism in a world long ago gone global communication-wise.