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European Union

EU seeks a digital single market to spur tech economy

Mike Snider
USA TODAY
European Commissionner for the Digital Single Market Andrus Ansip holds a press conference on the Digital Single Market at the European Commission in Brussels, on May 6, 2015.

WASHINGTON – The European Union's plan to create one set of rules for the online digital world that all of its member countries can follow should not cause concern in the U.S., a top EU official said here Thursday.

Earlier this month, the European Commission released its plan to create a "digital single market," that would standardize rules across the 28 different companies for copyright, taxes and online sales.

Such a "holistic approach" could spur innovation within the EU and its trading partners, said Andrus Ansip, the European Commission vice president for the digital economy. He is here to to meet with the White House and other government officials. "We've been able to create a single market for physical (goods) in the European Union, but a digital single market does not exist," he told USA TODAY in an interview at the headquarters of the Delegation of the European Union to the U.S.

The European Commission estimates that as much as 415 billion euros ($455 billion) is lost annually from practices such as geo-blocking, which prevents some EU residents from purchasing goods online from other EU member states or paying higher prices because of where they live.

"We are not talking just about money, but about fundamental rights," Ansip said. "We don't have to accept price discrimination and geo-blocking in the 21st century. It's a question about democracy."

Allowing small and medium-sized European companies to sell goods across all the member states will increase competition, he says, adding that the result will not be a "Fortress Europe," as some critics have argued.

This is "about opportunities not about protectionism, for all the companies including American companies," Ansip said.

Copyright changes would improve access to films and other streamed entertainment content across the EU -- and decrease the consumption of pirated content, Ansip said. Potentially innovative research is hampered by copyright laws in some member-states that prevent the legal mining of data sets.

"Today it is a lose-lose situation," he said. "We would like to create a bigger market (and) a win-win situation."

Earlier this month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he supported the EU proposal because now companies doing business there must "conform to 20 different versions of different kinds of laws."

That's despite the commission's plan to analyze online search and social media platforms for potential anti-competitive practices and privacy concerns. The commission seeks a "level playing field," that could affect Facebook and Google's activities.

Before Ansip's speech Thursday at the centrist The Brookings Institution, former U.S. deputy trade representative Miriam Sapiro asked whether the digital single market would "inadvertently or intentionally" lead to "new forms of discrimination against non-European online platforms and other services, whether they be headquartered in the United States or other countries?"

The EU hasn't made any decisions yet and Ansip would not address specific companies. But he did say that with "a single market there will be real predictability for investors. There will be rules that everybody is able to understand (making) it much easier to make those investment decisions."

And the U.S. itself is also looking at such platforms, Ansip says, noting that the Federal Trade Commission, which he is meeting with officials from while here, has its own "Sharing Economy" workshop next month. "It's a field where we can cooperate," he said.

Another area that the trading partners can trade notes on is net neutrality. Having met with Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler earlier this year, Ansip said that like the U.S., "we don't want to over-regulate, but we have to have clarity."

Haste is important, too, because some member-states such as the Netherlands have enacted their own net neutrality laws. "Very soon we will have 28 different regulations once again (and) we will not be able to have consensus," he said. "It means our market will be even more fragmented than it is right now."

Follow Mike Snider on Twitter: @MikeSnider

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