More than 10 new EU laws for the digital economy are in place or coming. These improve competition and consumer protection in areas such as digital platforms, artificial intelligence, product safety and data. However, all these rules together can also be incoherent or overlapping, unnecessarily hindering SME entrepreneurs. Today at the EU Telecom Council in Brussels with Belgium, Germany, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Slovakia and Sweden, Minister Dirk Beljaarts (Economic Affairs) called on the European Commission to address this.
The EU ministers responsible for the economy agreed in November that a 25% reduction in the regulatory burden is a goal for the new European Commission. The Netherlands therefore endorses the initiative of the new EU Commissioner Henna Virkkunen to analyze how the (new) digital legislation works for SMEs and whether sufficient account has been taken of the needs and constraints of SMEs. As far as the Netherlands is concerned, preferably within the 1st 100 days.
"Minister Dirk Beljaarts (Economic Affairs): "There is a major innovation in the EU digital single market. This is important to give entrepreneurs of all sizes opportunities for growth, to promote fair competition and to better protect consumers. Now that these rules are in place or imminent, it is good to check whether they achieve their purpose in practice."
"For example, SMEs doing digital business now often don't know where to start and don't have legal capacity. So how do you know which law applies to you and what that means? Whether this creates strong regulatory pressure is exactly what needs to be mapped. And if there are inconsistencies or overlap in (legal) texts, these can be addressed at the EU level."
The 9 EU member states including the Netherlands are calling on the European Commission to organize targeted panel discussions with digital SMEs to improve this. But also to collect legal examples of definitions of commonly used words in EU digital law that conflict. Such as "platform," "data" and "systemic risk. And to use AI language models to look at opportunities for merging and simplifying in those regulations.
A random Dutch cybersecurity entrepreneur is increasingly applying artificial intelligence (AI) - which they develop themselves - in their product and selling it to telecom companies, banks and the government in the EU. As a result, between now and a few years they will have to deal with the rules for privacy protection, AI, cybersecurity and data but also the sectoral rules that apply to the customer.
