The Blog of the European Association for Digital Transition
The Christmas holidays are over, extended in Spain to Three Kings Day, and the yearly ritual now heads directly to the sales season. A few years back it was a big social and economic event; now, in part because of the effect from Black Friday, it’s lost some relevance but is still marked on the calendar in red for many businesses.
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On December 15, the European Commission presented its regulatory proposal on a single market for digital services (known as the Digital Services Act), a common set of rules on intermediaries’ obligations and accountability across the digital single market.
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Should it be of interest, we are reproducing an article written by our president, Ricardo Rodríguez Contreras, in the Spanish newspaper El Economista, about our ‘Save your zone’ campaign.
All you have to do is walk down the shopping streets of any Spanish city to verify a reality: the lock downs and restrictions to fight the pandemic have put nearby businesses on the edge of a cliff. According to the Spanish Trade Confederation (CEC), some 67,500 establishments, 15% of the total, have already closed forever. And in the short term, almost 50,000 more could fall, estimates the same source. One in four businesses could disappear in just one year.
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Since the end of November, the European Association for Digital Transition has been doing the ’save your zone’ campaign in the four leading economies of the European Union – Spain, France, Italy and Germany. With this initiative, we are looking to defend nearby stores during a Christmas season that, for many businesses, will decide their survival.
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When the European Commission adopted a proposal for a Regulation on Privacy and Electronic Communications back in 2017, it probably had no idea of the conflict to come. Better known as the ePrivacy Directive, the proposed legislation simply aims to update protections of the fundamental right of EU citizens to privacy and confidentiality when using public communications networks. And it’s finally due to come into effect on 21 December.
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Amazon’s announcement last week that it was launching its own online pharmacy not only shook the US drugs market but also raised questions here in Europe. The online retail giant has already reshaped the shopping and shipping landscape. Now, it plans to enter the prescription and over the counter medicine market worth the equivalent of €260 billion in the US alone.
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Amazon was born in 1994 as a bookstore, because it was clear to Jeff Bezos that book sales were a perfect fit for e-commerce. The founder of Amazon developed the right idea at the right time, and the rest is an impressive story of business success: Amazon is worth more than a trillion and a half dollars on the stock exchange today. To give some context, this is a figure that far exceeds the combined GDP of Spain and Portugal.
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It is the decisive moment of the year for businesses with the arrival of ‘Black Friday’ and the Christmas celebrations. But here, too, 2020 is different: for many European businesses, whether they close the year better or worse over the coming weeks isn’t what’s at stake. What’s at stake, frankly, is their survival. If they do not perform well, they will shutter the windows forever, impoverishing the social and economic fabric of European cities.
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On November 11, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) published some “Recommendations” – in two parts – in response to the Schrems II ruling of July 16, 2020. This extremely important decision from the Court of Justice of the European Union invalidates the current international data transfers framework in the European Union and United States, considering that the rights of EU citizens are unprotected.
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The European Union has finalized a draft of its new Digital Services Act (DSA), which, according to all indications, will place restrictions on and control more closely the activity of large technology companies. There is even talk of forcing them to share their data with smaller companies and prohibiting them from applying any kind of preferential treatment for their products on their own platforms. All this is in the midst of a growing debate, also in the United States, about the excessive size and power of these companies and the possibility of forcing them to be split up to restore competition in the markets where they abuse their dominance.
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