Blog: Talking digital: a busy week for the Digital Single Market - Hoofdinhoud

A busy week for our project to build a Digital Single Market for Europe

This week marked something of a milestone in our work to draw up a strategy for the #DigitalSingleMarket, with some intense engagement with those that really matter for our digital future: Europe's people and businesses.

It opened on Monday with an #AskAnsip twitter chat, which I enjoyed as much as the one in October when the idea was to take an 'initial pulse' on digital issues.

As I said in my last blog, I wanted this chat to be a little more like 'Ansip Asks' so as to hear people's examples and evidence, stories and digital problems.

We certainly got a lot of questions, both in the days running up to the twitter chat and on the day itself. It was difficult, even impossible, to answer everything in the one hour we had available - especially with hundreds of tweets coming in non-stop. But we did our best, managing to respond at a rate of about two tweets a minute.

The week before, I had asked people to tweet in screenshots of when they had found themselves blocked on websites because of where they lived.

There was a great response with some very interesting examples, which all goes to show that geo-blocking is really a widespread and frustrating problem - and not only in Europe, of course.

You can see some of the examples on this summary 'story' of the twitter chat, and some of the many other issues that were raised in relation to the Digital Single Market. As before, the questions were filtered using #AskAnsip so you can still use this hashtag to look at the tweet exchanges. It will all be highly beneficial for our work on the DSM strategy that will be presented in May.

Thank you again to everyone who took part.

The next day we had the #Digital4EU conference, a major event designed to get everyone together - from across Europe's entire digital community - with an interest in what we are doing to build the #DigitalSingleMarket.

If you didn't get a chance to read or listen to my speech, I gave a list of some ideals that I would like to see as part of the foundation we are building for our digital future - a single contract law for online transactions, for example; a single data protection regime and clear system for data access; a copyright and licensing regime to benefit creators, publishers and consumers.

But as I said at the conference, I very much want to hear what you have to say. What kinds of problems do you face when you try to go digital?

You can now share your experiences and views on a dedicated Digital4EU website which has been created for gathering views to feed into the final DSM strategy.

Since we do not have that much time, please don't hesitate to post your views - research papers, blogs, screenshots, just a few lines - whatever you feel is most relevant and appropriate. Please use the website actively; I will be using and presenting these views at an important debate that all European Commissioners are due to hold on the DSM strategy on March 25, so we need to collect them before that date. Of course, the debate remains open after then as well.

Another blog soon

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