Viviane Reding sets stage for an ‘ambitious European Digital Agenda’

In her speech today at Brussels, she laid down her immediate priorities for a digital economy. They include boosting digital services, overcoming market fragmentation on business model and having better coordination on copyright issues within EU. She also emphasised on having a policy framework to prevent Europe from losing out to the US with regard to book digitisation.

Reding backed the Digital Single Market for consumers, creative industries and internet service providers, which is promoted by the European Digital Media Association (EDiMA) in its White Paper on future of the internet policy, published in June this year.

Her plans for the digital agenda come as a response to EDiMA’s white paper that aims at setting the priorities of the information society for the next five years. Reding said that the Digital Single Market is the “oilfield”, the source of all the range of services that will lead our economy to a knowledge based, fully digital economy.

In her first priority, she called for European nations to take decisive steps on addressing the issue of mass scale digitisation of books and orphan works or risk losing it to the US and called for resolving the copyright regulations.

In addition, she said: “All our work aimed at modernising the rules of telecommunications, at promoting the take-up of internet broadband, at developing ultra-fast, competitive and secure next generation networks would be almost useless if we don't promote the take-up of internet based services and of content distribution via the web.”

According to the commissioner, the free movement of digital services in Europe is severely hindered by fragmented sets of national rules. “Unless we tackle this problem, we will never reach the full potential of the knowledge economy for both businesses and consumers.”

Finally, Reding said that achieving the single market will be impossible if we leave aside certain parts of population and wished for an all-inclusive Euro pean-wide adoption of the global web accessibility and net neutrality.