European Union

The Digital Single Market needs no introduction when talking to people in Brussels. It is one of the Juncker Commission’s flagship initiatives, launched amid much anticipation back in May this year. The ‘DSM’ strategy announced a range of measures and ideas to improve access to online goods and services and help them ‘flourish’, and ‘maximise the growth potential’ of the Digital Economy in Europe. What does that mean exactly? Well, beyond the Commission-speak, it’s pretty simple really. But it takes a bit of digging to get to the core of what the Commission is trying to do.

First of all, it’s worth looking at why the DSM is such a big deal. This is an ambitious project. And, so far, attempts to introduce policy on digital issues at EU level have not been easy. There was the ‘Connected Continent’ proposal hailed by Commissioner Neelie Kroes as  ‘the single biggest thing the European institutions could finalise in 2014 to boost growth and jobs’. That was blocked in Council amidst squabbles over spectrum and roaming, and the institutions only managed to finalise it in October 2015 – having deleted most of the points which the Member States couldn’t agree on, leaving only about half of the original proposal. Then there is the General Data Protection Regulation, a hugely ambitious project to bring EU data protection laws into the digital era. That’s taken almost 3 years to finalise, and the Parliament and Council are still struggling to find agreement on some fundamental issues. And finally, the Network Information Security directive, a hugely important piece of legislation designed to protect us all from cybersecurity attacks – that’s also been in the works for almost three years. Just to put that into perspective, when the Commission wrote both these legislative proposals in 2011 and 2012, no-one had heard of Edward Snowden or Max Schrems and Uber, Snapchat and Tinder hadn’t been invented yet.

So, scene set. We get it. It takes a long time to pass legislation in the EU – that’s no surprise. But what I hope my little history lesson here has also shown is that when we’re talking about digital issues, the world moves fast even if the European institutions don’t. Which is why the Commission is trying to learn from past mistakes with its new flagship initiative, the DSM. This time, before even starting to write any legislative proposals, the Commission has been bending over backwards to get input from as many stakeholders as possible – both on a political and industry level. Politically, the Commission has been highly involved in the preparation of the Parliament’s report ‘Towards a Digital Single Market Act’ as they see it as an opportunity to figure out what MEPs want (or, more likely, what they don’t want) and forge some political compromise before the legislative process gets started. Similarly, industry has been trying to provide input to more than 10 public consultations launched on the DSM since September.

On the most ambitious (and, possibly, the most controversial) parts of the DSM, the Commission is moving forward cautiously. Geo-blocking, for example, was touted by Vice-President  Ansip as a ‘game-changer’ back when the DSM was launched in May this year. Ansip’s ‘crusade’ on geo-blocking, however, appears to have been scaled back. Whilst Ansip used to talk a lot about the frustrations of not being able to watch his favourite Estonian TV programmes online when he’s in Brussels, the public consultation on geo-blocking, which was launched in September, appears to focus almost entirely on geo-localisation techniques used by e-commerce sites – and largely overlooks the issue of copyright territoriality. The Commission has now announced that it will publish a proposal on ‘cross-border portability of online content services in the internal market’ under the banner of ‘copyright reform’. Which in all honesty sounds like it will tackle what Ansip originally called ‘geo-blocking’. Geo-blocking, therefore, appears to have been scaled back from a very complicated (and politically charged) question of copyright to focusing solely on e-commerce.

So, if geo-blocking is the first issue to be scaled back in the name of political compromise, what will be next? Lately, Commissioner Oettinger has been talking a lot less about his ambitions to regulate ‘platforms’, having faced strong criticism from MEPs across all parties and industry stakeholders. And what about copyright? We understand the Commission’s approach is to split it up into several ‘bite-sized’ pieces of legislation tackling specific issues, rather than attempting to reform all EU copyright rules in one go. But don’t worry – there’s still plenty of bite left in the DSM to keep everyone busy for the next year. The DSM may have come in like a lion, but it’s certainly not going out like a lamb.

 

Catherine Armitage

 

 

 

 

ClientEarth v Commission
Law governing the institutions
According to the General Court, impact assessments intended to guide the Commission in drawing up its proposals for legislative acts are not, in principle, to be accessible to the public before those proposals have been disclosed

Length of video : 203'
You may manually download this video in WMV (1.8Gb) format

Disclaimer : The interpretation of debates serves to facilitate communication and does not constitute an authentic record of proceedings. Only the original speech or the revised written translation is authentic.
Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

http://tvnewsroom.consilium.europa.eu/uploads/council-images/thumbs/uploads/council-images/remote/http_7e18a1c646f5450b9d6d-a75424f262e53e74f9539145894f4378.r8.cf3.rackcdn.com/consilium_16210_39350_24889_40.78_thumb_169_1446721189_1446721189_129_97shar_c1.jpg

EU Ministers of Finance meet in Brussels on 13 November 2015 to prepare the negotiations with the European Parliament on the 2016 EU budget.

Download this video here.

Apple's Tim Cook, left, chats with CBS's Les Moonves at Sun Valley, Idaho in July

With Margrethe Vestager handing down her decision last month that Starbucks and Fiat received unfair tax benefits from the Netherlands and Luxembourg, most believe it is just a matter of time before the EU competition chief does the same with the biggest of the tax cases she is examining: Apple’s comfortable arrangement with Ireland.

But in case anyone in Brussels expected Ireland to distance itself from the California-based tech giant ahead of the Vestager decision, the FT’s man in Dublin, Vincent Boland, has sent Brussels Blog a note on just how close the relationship remains – as evidenced by the reception chief executive Tim Cook received on a rare visit to the Irish capital:

Cook was on his way to Cork, where he announced that Apple’s operations in the south coast city would expand to create up to 1,000 new jobs by the middle of 2017. That will take the total workforce there to 6,000 – which he said would represent a quarter of the company’s workforce in Europe.

It is the sort of announcement the Irish government loves. Enda Kenny, the Taoiseach (prime minister) tweeted a photograph of himself and a smiling Apple boss: “Great to chat with Tim Cook on the day apple announce 1000 new jobs in Cork.”

Read more

For most people observing – including myself - the existence of two major groupings on the Leave side of the referendum wasn’t really an issue. Arron Banks’ Leave.EU hasn’t looked nearly as serious a proposition as Vote Leave, either in terms of ideological breadth or of general respectability (however you’d like to define that). Vote Leave has been sober, serious and generally had the feel of an official campaigning group. A bit dull, but worthy of communicating that side of the discussion.

Obviously, someone’s had a meeting at some point in recent weeks and decided that being a bit dull wasn’t the right play.

Hence, Students for Britain’s heckling at David Cameron’s CBI speech earlier this week. The stunt got some coverage, but was actually more noteworthy for Vote Leave’s support in the organising it: as Robert Oxley, Vote Leave’s media head, said:

“We will be working together closely during the campaign to do more of these protests – particularly at the AGMs of big companies who try to scare the British people into voting to remain”

This is not unreasonable as a strategy, and certainly the CBI looks rather less able to push a strong pro-EU line after this week’s events, so the logic is not that tenuous.

However, it has had the unexpected side-effect of moving Eric Pickles to complain to the Electoral Commission that Vote Leave’s stated intention to campaign ‘nasty’ should disbar them from becoming the official group. Pickles is broadly sympathetic to Cameron’s approach, enough that Vote Leave chose to portray the complaint as a sign that Cameron’s team was rattled and trying to deflect attention from the general indifference to his letter to Donald Tusk, which spelled out the broad areas for negotiation.

Obviously, in all of this, there’s a lot of spinning going on, but a number of things look pretty clear.

The first is that Vote Leave are very confident about becoming the official grouping. In practice, the CBI heckle wasn’t the most intrusive of actions and one that can’t easily be replicated at AGMs, so the intention to ‘do more of these’ remains just that, an intention. Students for Britain might find that until the Electoral Commission makes its decision, there will be more planning than action.

The second is that Leave.EU continues to suffer from a comparative lack of media  and popular interest. Recall that bad publicity is better than no publicity at all (VW might disagree on this one), especially if it allows Vote Leave to communicate the impression that Cameron is actually concerned enough to try using a third party to halt them.

The third is that the Leave side will always enjoy benefits from its position as the change option. As much as the status quo carries great weight, being the challenger allows for such opportunistic approaches that speak to images of pluck and verve. The Remain campaign will never have a similar opportunity to the CBI heckling, precisely because none of the major meetings of economic or social actors have taken a sceptical stance to EU membership.However, ‘meeting agrees something’ isn’t nearly as good a headline as ‘hecklers disrupt meeting’.

All of this comes with a warning, however. While it is good to mix things up, Vote Leave will have to balance that with the risk that others paint them as being less than serious. The heckling might has raised the profile of those involved and the issues around the CBI’s stance, but that’s still a considerable distance from changing peoples’ minds about how to vote. And neither side have cracked that one yet.

The post The curious path of Vote Leave appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

HSH Investment Holdings Coinvest-C and HSH Investment Holdings FSO v Commission
State aid
The General Court dismisses the action brought by two minority shareholders of HSH Nordbank and therefore upholds the Commission decision of 2011 authorising, under certain conditions, rescue measures in respect of that bank

Plenary sessions : Parliament urged member states to fulfil their pledges and pay for the EU migration actions that have been agreed by EU leaders. In Wednesday's debate, MEPs proposed to use an unexpected windfall of €2.3 billion from EU fines and customs duties to finance some of the measures. The Commission earlier said the new trust funds set up for Syria and Africa were short of €2.22 billion in national contributions.

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP