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

[chrisvdb]

> And that has been getting worse with the EU... not better.

Can you give me some examples? Our family business has been importing and exporting goods (motor vehicles) from all over Europe for over 40 years, and I can tell you that things have improved GREATLY because of the European union. Just to give you an idea, when the business just started a motor vehicle imported from for example Italy could not be registered in other European countries without making alterations because regulations were so different. In addition all the paperwork that was required would easily take up several hours per vehicle im/exported.

Re:Never going to happen

[Karmashock]

The italian olive oil situation is a good example.

There are olive groves there that have been supplying oil to local villages as well as exporting for time out of mind. And new EU regulations are requiring that the oil go through all sorts of additional regulatory steps as well as package it in specific EU approved bottles.

The people in the area would typically just come by with a jug and fill it up with fresh oil as needed. But that is being made illegal.

The result is that the small growers must sell not directly to customers but to a big business bottling plants that are ultimately going to be the only legal way to sell the oil. Importing and exporting the oil previously was also not a big deal... but again, regulations.

Can I ask what country you are based in? Because the worst effects of this stuff hit the poorer and less developed countries the hardest. The richer and more developed countries if anything benefit from it. The trade controls have consequences for segments of the economy less capable of dealing with the red tape.

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

[Karmashock]

A consentual system of standards would suit both situations.

That is... if you obey these rules you can put this symbol on your package. If you don't then you can't.

Then the consumer decides whether they care or not.

Everyone gets what they want.

Those that want those standards will look for that symbol and only buy products that meet it.

Customers that do not will choose indifferent to whether it is there or not.

And neither big companies nor small companies can complain or gain any advantage.

That is the power of the free market.

It gives everyone what they deserve and dynamically can respond to any situation because it relies on personal human judgement at every juncture.

No mechanized system can compete with it. You're pitting the minds of perhaps a few hundred specialists against BILLIONS of minds of people that will work on the issues not just once but every day and forever.

The problem with these regulations is that they are needlessly restrictive.

I believe the regulations went so far as to suggest that it would be illegal to even put the legally bought oil into a non-legal container... which would be anything besides what it was sold in. So if you wanted to put your oil in a nice looking glass beaker that would be illegal. You'd have to keep it in some sort of bottle that the company sold it in... never mind that that would be comparatively ugly.

I believe they've moderated a lot of these rules. I don't know how many of them still stand. But the point is that these regulations all come from a certain perspective.

In the case of the EU, that would be Brussels. And what makes sense in Brussels is not what is going to make sense in Greece or Denmark.

To regulate a territory of that span you need a more federated policy that grants member states the autonomy to achieve the SPIRIT of the law rather than the letter of the law.

After all, the spirit is actually what matters. The letter is relevant only so far as a court trial where one person or another tries to argue they were obeying when they quite obviously were not.

If you fill out all the paper work, go through the whole procedure and then still find a way to poison people... am I happy? Obviously not... people are poisoned. If you generally ignore the law and yet otherwise act in a completely ethical way where no one is hurt am I happy? Yep. I can't see why I'd have grounds to complain really if no one is getting hurt.

And that's how the EU should be structured. These regulations should be more guiding principles of behavior and conduct rather than very specific regulations that say things must be done in this way and no other.

What is more, such a system would be much more comprehensible since instead of ENDLESS pages of ultra specific regulations you'd have a much more summarized code that simply explains the objective, cautions against some things that have to be dealt with, an admonition that if there are problems that would be embarrassing for whomever is in charge.

This is in effect how a great deal of the EU already works. The member states are permitted to make most of their own laws and manage their own internal affairs. However, member nations are expected to hold to certain moral and ethical codes. You can't go randomly executing people for example and remain in good standing with the EU though I suspect there isn't a specific regulation that says you can't do that. And even if there were, it would be redundant since it wouldn't be tolerated.

Trying to manage so many cultures and languages as if they're all a single city being run by a city council is naive. A certain amount of flexibility must be allowed.

Now here you might say "but why must I permit someone's products into my country if they're not following procedures I feel are sufficient?" Well, do your people agree or is that just "you"? Because if your people agree then those products won't sell. And if they don't agree with you then they will. So... what exactly is

Re:Never going to happen

[rioki]

Because the worst effects of this stuff hit the poorer and less developed countries the hardest. The richer and more developed countries if anything benefit from it.

Although I understand the sentiment; the "richer" countries, e.g. Germany, already works with these "food safety" measures in place. They have had this drag on the marked already in place, so they did not need to adapt. The problem is when a new EU directive actually kills traditional products; like in France where the requirement to make cheese with pasteurized milk made something like 3/4 of the French cheeses impossible to make. (They resolved the issue with local exemptions.)

But once you comply with "improved" food and product safety requirements, the EU did help trade.

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.)

Re:Never going to happen

[nospam007]

"The people in the area would typically just come by with a jug and fill it up with fresh oil as needed. But that is being made illegal."

That's just because a lot of them gave the people oil from the year before last, or mixed that one with fresh oil.
It's their own fault this had to come.

Not to mention the unsanitary oil bottles on the restaurant tables that got filled with the same crap. Also the bottles were never cleaned in years!

That's why those practices got illegal. You can still put bottles on the tables, but they have to be labeled with the date and provenance and must be un-refillable.

Re:Never going to happen

[Karmashock]

Hmm... I see no evidence of that in europe.

If anything, the areas simply have more water so running out is less likely... and your communities are quite a bit older so things have fixed in place a bit more firmly.

Name a place in Europe that is having such problems with water that the aquifers are being drained and the earth itself is heaving inward... dipping in because all the water has been sucked out of the ground?

There are only a few places in Europe that you could really call a desert and they're all very near large amounts of fresh water.

The water laws and rights in the American south west and in Australia are the most complex in the world. And the reason for it is that water is life in those places.

Imagine owning 100,000 acres of land and it being utterly worthless because there is no water. Add the water and it is priceless. Remove it and it is worthless.

This is something that people in more precipitous regions do not grasp. They take the water for granted. It is something that falls from the sky and comes out of a pipe. Imagine neither of those things happening. The rivers running dry, the sky being bone dry for years, and even the deep wells running dry.

In such regions you plan for the drought that will come.

In California we have a bad one every 30 years or so. Last one was in the 70s. Very bad drought.

They worked out that the solution was to expand infrastructure to weather a drought that could last upwards of 5 to 7 years.

They drew up plans for new dams and aqueducts. New water treatment facilities... etc. And guess what? The fucktard successors looted the funds to pay for stupid projects... mostly for political reasons. And after all those years... the next big drought has come. And these idiots are blaming it on global warming. It was known this was going to happen decades ago. And they sat on it until it was too late. And all you'll hear out of them now are fucking excuses.

And who pays the price? The farmers. Because they're too weak to stop the cities from stealing their water.

Remember that tract of land with and without water? Exactly... everything they have... Gone. Stolen to cover up the incompetent management of the cities.

Re:Most expensive digital media market

[paavo512]

The most expensive digital media market wants the prices found in the markets in regions that have totally different income brackets and standards of living?

The general idea of EU is to unify these "totally different income brackets and standards of living". There are special huge help programs for poorer member states.

First principle - who pays?

[Anonymous Coward]

While as an ex-pat, I would doubtless appreciate the opportunity to view BBC iPlayer content free of charge, without use of proxies, etc. - however, those *resident* in the UK are paying for this service, and not through choice either (mandatory TV licence)

I am not sure if my ability to view free content would be fair on those who have no choice but to pay for it - and when you get started on sports broadcasts (football, etc.) - you will be coming up against some very well-funded and powerful interest groups.

Re:First principle - who pays?

[Dr.Saeuerlich]

There are many non geo blocked tax funded European radio and TV channels. Each of them likely has a percentage of their audience not paying fees. However there may be German/French/etd expats in England (or vice versa) who don't care much about the Beeb and who still have to pay the fee. It probably all levels out.
The other question is, is there a potential loss of income? And if so, how much do a few expats cause?

Re:First principle - who pays?

[jabuzz]

I would also point out that selling the content in other territories around the world has been an importance source of revenue for the BBC for many decades. Without it the license fee would have to be much higher to support the content that is produced.

In effect the license fee payers in the United Kingdom only pay for part of the production of a program. As such giving the program away for free to those that did not contribute to it does in fact hurt.

Holy Wars

[Roger W Moore]

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.

Actually there is a very good reason for this. God exports between countries within Europe tended to involve lots of men with very pointy sticks and were usually rather unpleasant for anyone involved. This seems to have rather killed of the business in recent years.

Re:What was yours is now ours.

[MinamataHG]

Federalism fails when it ignores cultural distinctions between its member states, igniting controversies that are needlessly provocative and could easily have been avoided.

The iPlayer provides publically funded news and entertainment services targeting a domestic not a European or global audience --- on the face of it, a benign and legitimate purpose.

Dumb reason...
Being a foreigner in Japan, I'd like to access contents payed with my taxes from overseas.
No, I can't. So, I have to download or find another to stream contents.

Absolutely crucial

[j1976]

The situation since new-year is absolutely horrendous. At January 1st, the VAT rules changed so that digital goods have to be taxed using the VAT rate of the buyer's location, and using the tax law of the buyer's home country. That is: a web shop of any size have to keep track of up to 80 different VAT rates, and the disparate tax law regarding VAT of 28 different EU countries in order to deduce which VAT rate and goods classification is applicable on each single transaction.

As a telling example: In several countries an e-book is only an e-book if it has an ISBN number (usually with a lower than standard VAT rate). Otherwise it's a digital service (with a higher VAT rate). In other countries it's a e-book as long it's a digital text. Or humorously enough, in the case of France: It's only taxed as an e-book if it doesn't have pornographic content, otherwise it's taxed as a digital service.

A good start would be what is proposed in the press release: Harmonized VAT rates and rules for digital goods.

Re:Absolutely crucial

[arkhan_jg]

The reason behind it was to stop companies (e.g. amazon, apple and google) setting up shop in the lowest tax countries in the EU (luxembourg and ireland), and thus by only charging a low rate of VAT when exporting to the rest of the EU. This enables them to beat smaller domestic companies on final price, pay less tax overall, and funnels what little tax is collected into these tax havens. So the bigger EU countries were seeing a hefty fall in their direct VAT receipts, and loss of business from domestic companies to these giants that can relocate where they like, thus employment costs and indirect tax losses.

Fixing it by harmonizing VAT rates would require treaty changes and be politically hard to hand one of the big financial levers to the european central bank, especially given not all countries are in the eurozone - imagine the US forcing all state sales taxes to the same rate, set by the fed, and you get the idea.

Thus making companies pay VAT in the buyer's country, not the seller's. What they should have done though is put in a threshold, so companies/sole traders below a certain size were exempt, but that was opposed by some so it was dropped, and well, here we are where a mechanism intended to help small traders against the multinationals is a lot easier for the big boys to follow, particularly the requirements to keep id information about buyer location. Once they roll it out for physical goods too, it's going to be such a cluster f**k.

Hopefully though, the rise of MOSS compliant payment processors should make the system easier to follow - you just put a disclaimer up that final price will be based on the buyers VAT rate, and let the payment processor calculate the right rate and store the records.

Digital Single Market ?!?

[tlambert]

Digital Single Market ?!?

Tell me: why do they want to build a dating site again?

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.