Manufacturers and producers are increasingly putting in place contractual and technological restrictions limiting consumers’ ownership. Examples include restrictive licensing terms for product with embedded software, restrictions in the spare-part and repair market, and prohibitions to resale event tickets.

The European Commission should support consumers and their rights to resell, repair, and reuse what they already own.

High-speed broadband access is a key enabler of small online business; connectivity being one of the four GEN building blocks. We therefore strongly support the EU’s gigabit society goals of supplying every European with access to at least 30 Mbps of connectivity and to provide half of European households with connectivity rates of 100 Mbps by 2020. Fast and cheap connectivity needs to reach all rural areas of the EU.

eBay research shows how the online commerce platform model opens up market opportunities across the EU (as well as globally) for small European enterprises, but these opportunities are not exclusive to businesses in the economic hubs. As the European Commission has correctly identified, cross-border parcel delivery is a key building block of a fully functioning Digital Single Market. While the parcel delivery sector is innovating and evolving to serve online commerce, there are system failures that harm small infrequent senders in general and those in peripheral areas in particular.

The European Commission recently issued a Recommendation to EU Member States and Online Platforms on “illegal content online.”  The Recommendation takes a largely horizontal approach covering a wide range of illegal content ranging from fake news, IP infringements, and hate speech to unsafe products.

The EU’s new VAT rules for e-Commerce, coming into force in 2021, will make online marketplaces liable for collecting VAT on behalf of non-EU businesses using their services to reach EU consumers. Some have suggested such obligations should be expanded to cover EU businesses trading on online marketplaces.

Technology has fundamentally changed the nature of international commerce by allowing small businesses and consumers to become direct trade actors and transact across borders. SMEs anywhere in the world can find and serve customers across the globe without having a physical establishment in each country they serve. This new form of trade challenges authorities across different governance areas – from market surveillance to tax and consumer protection authorities.

At this point in the ongoing evolution of the Internet, most online activities rely on digitally interconnected ecosystems built on top of the Internet’s access layers. These online platforms have become resources for users to reap the benefits of the connected world.

New VAT rules adopted by EU Member States, set to come into force in 2021, significantly increase the VAT compliance burden for MSMEs that trade across the EU Digital Single Market. As of 2021, SMEs serving customers in other EU countries will need to charge the VAT rates of their customers’ country after crossing a low pan-European sales threshold of EUR 10,000. Hence, SMEs will need to have the compliance capability of charging hundreds of different VAT rates, depending on where their customers are based and what type of product is being sold.