European Contract Law and the Digital Single Market: Current Issues and New Perspectives

Abstract

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND CONTRACT LAW Digital technology has significantly changed the balance in society and economic relationships, offering new opportunities for innovative business models. This raises challenging questions affecting several aspects of the law. Scholars, practitioners, policy-makers and legislators are therefore involved in an ongoing debate and need to find appropriate answers in order to react adequately to the challenges of the digital revolution. This book aims to chart, analyse and clarify some of the main questions and issues. For a functioning market economy, private law has to provide a general framework and efficient tools. The realisation of a connected Digital Single Market is one of the ten priorities of the European Commission, which aims to react appropriately to the challenges of the digital revolution in order to use this opportunity for economic growth. In the framework of its Digital Single Market Strategy, the European Commission announced a set of measures aiming to create better access to digital goods and services across Europe for both consumers and businesses, underlining that the absence of consistent EU-wide criteria creates barriers to entrance, hinders competition and reduces predictability for investors throughout Europe. The harmonisation of European private law is a challenge of increasing significance and has inspired important developments, as shown for example by the European Commission's release, on 9 December 2015, of three legislative proposals as a part of its ‘Digital Single Market Strategy’: the Proposal for a Directive on certain aspects concerning contracts for the supply of digital content, the Proposal for a Directive on certain aspects concerning contracts for the online and other distance sales of goods, and the Proposal for a Regulation on ensuring the cross-border portability of online content services in the internal market. Since then, on 27 April 2016, EU Regulation 2016/679 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data has been adopted.