News item | 06-12-2024 | 11:00
More than 10 new EU laws on the digital economy are in force or on the way. 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 inconsistent or overlapping and thus unnecessarily hinder SME entrepreneurs. Today, Minister Dirk Beljaarts (Economic Affairs) called on the European Commission at the EU Telecom Council in Brussels with Belgium, Germany, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Slovakia and Sweden to address this.
The EU ministers responsible for the economy agreed in November that a 25% reduction in regulatory burden is a target 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 the needs and limitations of SMEs have been sufficiently taken into account. As far as the Netherlands is concerned, preferably within the first 100 days.
Minister Dirk Beljaarts (Economic Affairs): “There is a major innovation in the EU digital internal market. This is important to give entrepreneurs from small to large growth opportunities, to promote fair competition and to better protect consumers. Now that these rules have been introduced or are about to be introduced, it is good to see whether they achieve their goal in practice.”
“For example, SMEs that do digital business often do not know where to start and have no legal capacity. So how do you know which law applies to you and what that means? Whether this will result in strong regulatory pressure is precisely what needs to be determined. And if there are inconsistencies or overlaps in (legal) texts, these can be addressed at 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 ‘system risk’. And to use AI language models to look for opportunities for merging and simplification in those regulations.
Example: Dutch cybersecurity company
Any 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.