The Net and the European Union
I found this article really interesting and I though I’d translate it to english (it is originally written in spanish). The article is from Enrique Dans and published at Expansión on the 29th of October 2009. Enrique Dans is a known spanish blogger and Expansión is a also an important spanish economic journal.
This is, of course, my own free translation of the article, and neither I or my small site has any relation with the author or the journal where it was published.
The article:
This is not what they sold to us. The European Union, at the Net level, is a bad joke: we have a continent that does not work in the Net and a European Parliament determined to make it work even less.
Europe in the Net is an optical illusion. Only 4% of the online stores of the continent sell to more than 10 countries, and the immense majority sells only to one country or two. Three countries, UK, France and Germany, concentrate 70% of the european electronic commerce. In them and in the nordic countries the electronic commerce is a reality. But in most of the cases we are talking about purely national initiatives, not transnational. The rest, that * underdeveloped-internet Europe* to which we belong, lacks the necessary scale to make the electronic commerce grow: since it only works with users inside their borders it lacks enough scale to develop. The final result is a progressive increment in the gap between those countries and the rest, something that we will pay in its due time.
At this point, who ever does not recognize the electronic commerce as one of the most important promoters of economic development should check his eyesight. Its role as a reducer of friction and a generator of efficiency makes it a genuine consume booster, even further than what the statistics say: a lot of the purchases outside the Net come from decisions taken in front of a screen. In some strategic sectors for the spanish economy, like tourism, the impact of Internet is huge, even as to become quantitatively the most important channel.
Why does not electronic commerce develop more in Europe? Simply, because in the actual conditions, it is impossible: an insurmountably complex and inharmonic legal framework creates an intolerably costly business environment to anyone that wants to operate in it. Costly and unpredictable.
To be unpredictable is the worse it can happen in the business field. The expensive can find its place in the market, at some point under the curve of offer and demand, but the unpredictable is a direct inhibitory factor. And a great deal of that arbitrariness is because of that temple of inefficiency known as customs office: in the spanish customs office a packet can stay from hours to weeks, and generate to the consumer customs duties so arbitrary that one would say they have been calculated by a monkey whacking at the calculator. Europe without borders? The border restrictions are such that most of the stores choose to not serve orders to other countries. Something that, in most cases, is done by obfuscation: the order gives an error when the card is registered abroad, the shopping cart disappears, the logistics cannot be calculated…
A concrete case, the business of intangible goods under copyright, it is so flagrant that deserves a special mention: for the copyright collector societies the ideal scenery is that of isolated countries: let us not forget that we do not talk about artists—who on principle would be interested in making their work reach as many markets as possible—but of parasites which thrive thanks to the inefficiency of the system. For that, because of their own nature, they try to hinder in any way possible the development of a single market.
In reality, the development of P2P sharing platforms is not because of evil consumers, but because due to this restrictions the industry has been unable to give a competitive offer. To develop any service means years of negotiations and tons of money.
Meanwhile, the recent elimination of the amendment 138 of the Telecom Packet—which protected us from eavesdropping and monitoring without warrant—and the cuts of service after three notices, shows that the European Parliament does not act in the interest of its citizens but following the dictates of pressure groups form the industry of contents and telecommunications. In Europe, Internet advances to become something different to the Internet.
