The Blog of the European Association for Digital Transition
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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The serious discrepancies between the European Parliament and the Council, chaired this six-month period by Germany, confirm what was already felt: It will not be easy to implement the historic EU post-COVID reconstruction agreement, closed last July by the heads of government. This is bad news for everyone, but especially for the countries most in need of this shot of investment, such as Italy and Spain.
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It’s been 12 years since Bitcoin was born, and with it the phenomenon of cryptocurrencies, digital assets not issued by any central authority and transacted through blockchain technology. In these 12 years, Bitcoin has experienced dramatic swings in value, becoming established as a high-risk speculative item – in the last 12 months it has been revalued by 20% – but not as a commonly used currency.
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For years, the big American technology companies have grown without too many regulatory impediments to the point of becoming global mastodons. Thanks to attractive products and services that respond to market demand, with loose or directly non-existent regulations in some areas, and wrapped in the American dream aura of the entrepreneur in their garage who becomes a billionaire, the big Silicon Valley companies have achieved such a powerful market position that many consider them de facto monopolies.
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When the history of the big technology companies in the twenty-first century is written, the date of July 29, 2020, might have its place. On that day, the four CEOs of the ‘Big Tech’ Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple appeared before the United States House of Representatives antitrust subcommittee, whose members have been investigating their alleged anti-competitive practices for years.
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The EU now has its ‘moonshot’ for the next decade. The German Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy, Peter Altmaier, used this term, which is shorthand for projects that are very ambitious both in time and investment, to refer to GAIA-X, the european cloud services platform that the two strongest governments in the EU, Germany and France, are launching.
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From the beginning of its mandate in December 2019, the new European Commission has been showing strong leadership in Digital Transition. Proof of this is publication of the European Strategy for Data, which has recently been submitted for public consultation.
The European Association for Digital Transition welcomes the Commission’s proposal. Nevertheless, we have provided our observations, detailing our position regarding the proposed benchmarks.
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All developed economies face enormous challenges in their digital transition process, such as what to do about privacy and their citizens’ data, the new labour frameworks brought about by digitalisation and the taxation of large platforms, who are barely anchored in national legislation. The experiences and perceptions of citizens are fundamental to addressing these challenges. To find out more about these experiences, the Center for the Governance of Change (CGC), a part of IE University, has carried out the second edition of a study that, beginning with its title, is focused on Europe. This is European Tech Insights, a report that tries to build, through a comprehensive survey in 11 countries, eight of them European (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom), a knowledge base for these digital transition processes.
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