Europe Moving Toward Single Digital Market

> European officials hope the removal of online barriers could add tens of billions of dollars to the region’s annual gross domestic product over the next decade.

hmm... so what are those barriers? what will change?

> Some of the European proposals are expected to target American companies. Changes to Europe’s complicated copyright rules could force Google and other news aggregators to pay European publishers to use their online content. The Brussels policy makers are also likely to push for legislation to regulate online messaging services like WhatsApp... And the officials are also expected to announce new investigations into how American-owned online platforms like Uber, the ride-booking service, and Airbnb, the lodging website, operate in the region. Those inquiries might eventually lead to legislation aimed at helping European companies compete on a level playing field with their much-larger American competitors in the so-called sharing economy.

So instead of removing barriers and encouraging growth inside Europe, let's put barriers to US companies, to "level the playing field".

Any word about VATMOSS? I'd like to see a young (or even not so young) startup trying to figure out this mess of charging different tax rates across 28 different countries. Not just charging, but keeping records with location info with 2 matching forms of evidence for 10 years. Those barriers also apply to non-EU companies by the way, but no sane small-company outside the EU is really going to bother. How is that for a level-playing field?

Or what about the cookie law? Yup. Let's put a big warning sign on every site accessed in the EU. This will remove the barriers for sure.

And that's even before we talk about localization into dozens of languages, or local / tax-specific regulations...

... and the examples on this article are also perplexing. Mobile phone roaming charges? (isn't this old news?) access to Netflix? Is this what's going to make the EU compete on a level playing field with the US?

I usually avoid rants, but this article really make me lose hope of building a small business in the EU.

Last year Denmark voted for the Unified Patent Court. The obvious argument was that it made it easier for the little inventors to get their patents approved across all of europe. It removed bureaucracy and it made it cheaper.

But here is the thing. By making it easier to get your patents approved in one country to be valid in all of EU countries you are also opening up for patent trolls because now it's much cheaper for them to try and get patents.

So in a weird way many would argue it's going to have the opposite effect. It's going to make it easier for those who specialize in patents to start getting access to markets it was too expensive before. (In fact a US patent troll has been setting up their office in Ireland exactly because of the expected unification of the Patent Process)

For startups the unification is also presenting itself as kind of a headache because when you unify something a bunch of countries have to adhere to whatever the unification results in. So again it sounds great on paper but the consequence might well be unfortunate.

And now this. Which sounds great but is going to present more problems than it's solving.

What Europe really need is for the taxation side of the markets to be unified NOT the legislative process yet this is exactly what the EU does again and again and it's hurting more than it's helping.

I wrote more about this issue in this essay for those who might be interested: http://000fff.org/why-is-europe-failing-to-create-more-unico...