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[..]A single digital market would be a great equaliser, and would ensure fairness across our borders.
The potential for economic growth is difficult to argue with. A single digital market would save us €100 billion a year and generate €340 billion in additional growth. It would also potentially positively affect hundreds of millions of people weekly, as according to the EU's own figures 315 million EU citizens go online per day and 360 million each week. Essentially, the digital market as it exists is not fit for purpose, but it could be. Existing patchwork legislation could be simplified and streamlined into a system which would be better for everybody.
MEPs want Europe to seize the opportunities opened up by new technologies, such as Big Data, cloud computing, the Internet of Things or 3D-printing, and to have an innovation-friendly policy towards online platforms. [...] All of this means jobs: over 30,000 people are employed in the local commercial creative sector - including nearly 10,000 employed in software, games and new media.
But what would this fairer digital market look like for the general public? It would end, for example, unjustified geo-blocking within the EU, which is the practice of restricting access to internet content according to the user's geographic location. [...] Today MEPs have called for measures to ensure nationally-bound online content services are available to consumers when they are abroad as a first tentative step.
[...]MEPs have also called for equivalent and future-proof consumer protection, regardless of whether digital content is purchased online or offline - extending EU consumer protection to meet the challenges of a digital world. [...]
Ultimately, the future is already here. It no longer makes sense for us to treat digital and physical boundaries separately, as the world in which we live no longer makes that distinction.
Full article on The Huffington Post