No transaction cost problem to address.

The European Commission (EC) justifies the introduction of the Country of Origin principle for ancillary online services to a broadcast with the “high translation costs for the acquisition of rights for their online services when they are offered across borders”.

However, the European Commission’s Impact Assessment acknowledges that the EC has no quantitative data to verify this assumption. As such, the Commission has based its proposed policy actions on an inexistent fact base and has chosen to ignore the results of the Charles River Associates economic study that it commissioned for the Impact Assessment. This study found only small or negligible transaction costs.

In contradiction with the EU Better Regulation Guidelines, found within the EC’s own Work Programme for 2017, the Commission acknowledges that “due to the limited availability of data, both the costs and the savings of the Commission’s proposal could not be quantified.”

Extending a legacy legislation developed for a specific technology more than two decades ago (satellite technology in the early 1990s) is simply not for for purpose for the online environment.