Consumers vs Citizens in the Digital Single Market : A Societal Issue

The European Commission has issued last May a Communication called Digital Single Market (DSM) strategy for Europe that contains 3 pillars of actions to remove the barriers to a Digital Single Market.

This article draws attention on the first pillar of actions that is supposed to improve lives of European citizens. The main diagnosis of the European Commission is there are not enough cross border e-commerce transactions because it is far too expensive and/or complicated for the consumers and for the SMEs.

The European Commission is facing already a blockage with the roaming costs and net neutrality issues which belong to its previous initiative: a Telecoms Single Market (TSM). The Commission and the Parliament want the roaming cost to be gone by the end of this year and obviously the Council representing the Member States is slowing down the process by postponing it.

But the central question is: If it is cheaper for the consumers is it really better for the citizens?

The answer is not that obvious and the globalization gives us a drastic insight here.

Indeed let us go extreme for the full comprehension of what is really at stake: If we all choose to buy online and far away because it is cheaper and easier it is obvious that we do not favor our local market. We force it to compete with far away cheaper markets. And if that is considered to be good and efficient from a liberal point of view it is only true to a certain point for the citizen: this point is actually reached when our social rights and societal investments are affected by this competition. We all know there are countries where there is hardly any social right, which means the work cost there is cheaper than the work cost in our local market. And sadly for the citizen this difference reflected in the price tag will push the consumer to buy far away. That ultimately affects our local market: the related industries will relocate creating unemployment and poverty locally and ultimately a reduction of the social cost and societal investments to at least survive.

Now if we stay in Europe, what we have just described above means that by increasing the cross border transactions we are going to favor automatically the European countries where the social cost is the lowest simply because the transactions there are cheaper. So if I am a citizen of a European country where the social cost is high I am going to loose my social advantages slowly but surely; I may even face unemployment directly or indirectly (through relatives and/or friends) just because I was pushed to buy cheaper next door. On the opposite if I belong to a European country where the social cost is lower I will not face unemployment but my social rights won’t increase.

What we can learn here as European citizens is that we may be angry as European consumers that the Council is slowing down the Single Market (Digital or not) but we should be thankful and actually call for an harmonization of our social rights before the harmonization of the market in order to secure the level of the social rights we want to preserve.