Single Market 2.0: the EU as a Platform

By: Daniel Alexand…
Created: 26 May 2020 - 11:05
Updated: 26 May 2020 - 12:05

The College of Europe has published a paper dealing with the further integration of the Single Market against the background of rapid technological progress. Covid 19 comes on top with additional challenges. 

"EU policymakers are confronted with a frustrating prospect: as they try to complete the Single Market, technological evolution is pushing the frontier of integration further, requiring new efforts and policies to fully achieve the desired goal. In particular, the digital transformation is changing the traditional, textbook economics of market integration, based on tenets such as economies of scale and the four freedoms. The rise of the digital economy requires a radical change in the policies for the Single Market, as well as in the trade policies that underpin the whole market integration process. Trends such as the virtualisation, servitisation and platformisation of the economy (as described below), coupled with the rise of the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence, make market integration at once more appealing and increasingly challenging for EU policymakers, projecting the Single Market into a complete new dimension, in which the “Fifth Freedom” (the free circulation of non-personal data) is intertwined with new concerns with the need to protect fundamental rights, and at the same time secure Europe’s technological sovereignty."

Find more about the paper and its author on https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrearenda/