Our continuing political neglect of this situation is arresting – even as European buyers and sellers have moved online in ever greater numbers over the past decade, we seem to have forgotten that opening the Single Market for conventional commerce through the late 1980’s produced an additional 2.2% of GDP and 2.75 million more jobs between 1992 and 2006.115 The same commitment to creating a continental-scale home market was fundamental to the global success of European mobile technology when 20 years ago Europe introduced a single GSM standard for mobile telephony buttressed by deregulation of the telecom sector. In contrast, over the past 10 years, Europe has conspicuously and systematically failed to address the obstacles fragmenting our digital markets. • European digital innovators must deal with cyber frontiers that prevent them from providing a single pan-European service to all 27 Member States.116 • The EU Services Directive in particular fails to breakdown such barriers because it excludes the “country of origin principle”, meaning that providers of digital products and services still have to deal with 27 different sets of national legislation.
Another example of successful decision-making at the European level is in the area of public safety. In 1996, European decisions produced a harmonised allocation of public safety spectrum, resulting in the widespread adoption of Europe-wide public-safety communications systems. For more than a decade, these decisions have been an unqualified success. Emergency services require additional spectrum to enable them to use the latest technologies to aid their work. DIGITALEUROPE welcomes President Barroso’s focus on the need to build a genuine Digital Single Market in his ‘Political Guidelines for the next European Commission’ transmitted to the European Parliament in September 2009, and to see the need for a Digital Single Market included in the 2009 Visby Declaration of the Swedish Presidency of the European Union.117 The building of a Digital Single Market requires European Union’s leaders to pursue a sustained harmonisation drive across a number of areas impacting online commerce and service provision. A horizontal approach to policymaking will be required to make progress across a number of apparently unrelated areas to eliminate barriers to a Digital Single Market.
GSM is often cited as a success story for European companies in the global mobile telephony market – the GSM Directive, the Single Market including common standards and telecoms liberalisation allowed European companies in network infrastructure, mobile handsets and mobile network operations to grow to scale in the ‘home’ market before going global. This was specific to the circumstances of the time and the market. For webbased technology, almost all prominent and large-scale success stories are from the US, with European industry building on the innovative impetus coming from the USbased companies. We believe this is, in part, because of the scale that the large domestic US market has offered these players. Internet entrepreneurs in the EU face tremendous hurdles in crossing borders and in getting to scale. By remaining sub-scale they cannot compete with larger players and rarely grow beyond their domestic markets.
115 Adriaan Dierx and Fabienne Ilzkovitz, Op. cit. | 116 DIGITALEUROPE’s contribution to the European Commission’s consultation on the future EU 2020 Strategy: http://www.digitaleurope.org/index.php?id=36&id_article=409 | 117 Barroso, Op. cit., http://www.se2009.eu/polopoly_fs/1.22793!menu/standard/file/conclusions%20visby.pdf
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