We all got used very quickly to the abolition of roaming charges within the EU. And we may also enjoy prepaid Netflix, HBO Go, Amazon Prime, Spotify or Deezer subscriptions while travelling within the European Union. Yet another step towards the digital single market is the EU regulation on geo-blocking, which should significantly encourage e-commerce, effective from December 2018.
According to surveys, only 15% of Europeans currently purchase goods through websites based in another member state. Among the reasons are geo-blocking practices whereby traders restrict access to their websites, block orders from abroad, offer different prices to customers solely on the grounds of their nationality, or otherwise limit the range of goods and services offered to customers from another member state.
The regulation guarantees to all customers of EU member states identical conditions to access goods and services, as long as the goods are delivered in a member state to which the trader offers delivery or are collected at a location agreed upon with the customer. The traders, however, will not be obliged to deliver goods to all member states: it will remain their choice whether they wish to send their goods to a particular country.
The equal access rule shall also apply to electronically supplied services such as cloud services, data warehousing or website hosting. On the other hand, the regulation will not apply to services featuring the provision of copyright protected content. Therefore video or music streaming or provision of e-books will be excluded from the scope of the regulation. The European Commission will, however, review this exclusion in two years’ time and may then extend the scope of the regulation to this area as well.
Traders providing services in physical form, such as accommodation or car rentals, will also be banned from applying different approaches to customers from other member states based on their nationality, place of residence or place of establishment.
The regulation also addresses unjustified discrimination in relation to payment methods. Traders will not be allowed to apply different payment conditions to customers solely on the grounds of their nationality or place of residence. At the same time, the regulation will prohibit traders from blocking or restricting foreign customers from accessing their websites.
Unlike price discrimination, standard price differentiations will not be prohibited: traders will remain free to offer different general conditions, including prices, in various countries (while observing the non-discrimination rules).